The Kurzweil subsidiary of Xerox Corp has cut the price of OCR readers for the blind to UKP8,000 from UKP23,000 with the introduction in to the UK of the Personal Reader, through Northhampton-based distributors Sight & Sound Technology, a division of the 100-strong John Bradburn Computer Systems group: the machine takes the size of a reader down to a rather large shoebox from that of a household washing machine, but still incorporates Discover, the new Kurzweil scanner, and the proprietary DECTalk DEC speech chip designed in the UK at DEC Park in Reading; the entry level model is UKP7,900 and uses a mouse moved across a page to read, while the top-end model comes for UKP11,700, scans a full page at a time, and can be interfaced to a Braille writer for translations.
