‘Biggest breakthrough since Braille’ for visually impaired people

Print Solutions

Crawford Technologies has launched a new solution that allows visually impaired users to read printed pages. Innovative Voiceye technology enables people with visual or cognitive impairment to read text from printed pages using a smartphone.

‘Voiceye is possibly the biggest breakthrough in accessible documents since Braille was invented by Louis Braille in 1821,’ said Ernie Crawford, CEO of Crawford Technologies. ‘Voiceye allows organisations to create 'talking paper', so all their documents can be read by anyone.’

Voiceye is based on a patented, ultra high density barcode – smaller than a QR code – that can hold the information from several pages in a single barcode. Using a free smartphone app, Voiceye barcodes are scanned and allow visually impaired users to use their phone's standard accessibility features to hear the document spoken to them. They can also read the printed document in large font and high contrast viewing modes or display them on refreshable Braille displays. The app can also link to 'Google Translate' for people who need to read their documents in a different language.

‘Voiceye Maker for Operations Express’ allows high volume document producers to make all their documents into fully accessible pages. By implementing Voiceye Maker for Operations Express to make documents accessible, organisations can significantly reduce the costs of creating separate documents in Braille, large print, e-text and audio from scratch.