Ray Kurzweil’s Blio eReader: New, Free & Accessible to People with CD

Ray Kurzweil is a giant in the accessibility industry.  He has been inventing reading machines and devices used by people with visual- and reading disabilities for 35 years.  His newest creation is the Blio eReader, digital-book-reading software.

Note: At the time of this writing, the Blio eReader is not yet available to the public.  However, in a CNET interview (video below), Ray Kurzweil says it will be within one month.

Blio eReader Feature Highlights

  • It combines full-color, digital content with Web content, video, and audio narration.
  • It runs on Windows computers, tablets and mobile devices such as the iPhone.
  • It is free, and has access to a million free books. (Presumably, there will be a store of books for sale.)
  • Its catalog includes “cookbooks, travel guides, how-to books, schoolbooks, art books, children’s stories, and magazines”.
  • Books can have interactive, multi-media content and quizzes.

Accessibility Features Good for People with Cognitive Disabilities

The Blio eReader:

  • reads books aloud via either an accompanying, human-read audio track or via a text-to-speech reader;
  • synchronizes its synthesized voices with “follow-along word highlighting”;
  • has adjustable reading speed and font size;
  • has a text-only mode good for minimizing distractions and also for displaying on small screens;
  • uses a “3D book view which includes realistic page turning”; and
  • can be connected to a personalized set of reference Web sites for “one-touch look-up of highlighted phrases”.

In the YouTube video below, CNET interviews Ray Kurzweil about the Blio eReader.  A demonstration of it begins at about 2 minutes, 23 seconds (point 2:23).  This video is not closed captioned.

References

Note: No endorsement of the Blio eReader is intended or implied.