The Wearables Giving Computer Vision to the Blind

When he was in school, Michael Hingson created a Braille computer terminal so he could study like all the other students. Fresh out of college, he worked on the development of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind, the first commercial text-to-speech machine for the visually impaired. He's used white canes and guide dogs, voice controls on his smartphone and virtual assistants like Alexa, all in the name of doing things on his own despite being blind since birth. Until recently, that just seemed impossible. So when Hingson talks about the time he assembled a piece of furniture with Ikea-style pictorial directions, it's as if he's scaled a mountain.