Eye-Pal is a one-pound foldable USB device that is faster than flatbed scanners – it takes only a few seconds from a single keystroke to speech or Braille output.

At home or away, even in the dark, Eye-Pal allows you to browse through piles of letters and organize them either as paper or computer files, read bound books, newspapers, or professional magazines and save as text or sound with one click.

Blind users know exactly where to place the material to be scanned because they can touch and feel L-shaped edges.

The foldable stand designed for the blind holds a digital camera over the printed matter. The camera is always at the exact distance needed to create a clear image.

Eye-Pal’s patented motion detector allows scanning a bound book at 20 pages per minute. You turn a page over; wait half a second for the shutter sound, turn again and again, it’s that easy.

With a single keystroke you can easily start and stop scanning or reading or get the description of the page layout spoken as a sighted reader sees it.

The saved text can be carried anywhere and used with iPod, key chain memory, CDs and more.