By: Tiffany Chan, Victoria Murawski, and Jentery Sayers In our lab at the University of Victoria, we are currently remaking a reading optophone: an aid for the blind that converted text into sound during the twentieth century. Although the reading optophone never existed in a stable or fixed form, a common configuration involved operators placing books and other print materials on glass. They then used a handle to move a reading head located below the glass, sliding it back and forth to scan pages. As pages were scanned, the machine would express type as a series of audible tones. To…
Author: J.J. Sylvia IV
Tiffany Chan
J.J. Sylvia IV is an Assistant Professor in Communications Media Theory at Fitchburg State University. His research interests include big data, posthuman media studies, and digital pedagogy.