well the most I have gotten is a braille menu at certain restaurants

Reminds me of a concept in the recent edition of the pen and paper RPG Shadowrun, all communications in the fourth edition is handled by a "commlink" which is a sort of combination mobile/cell phone and PDA with full access to its version of the internet. It's possible to get the menu for anywhere you go on it as you walk in, and it makes me wonder whether some time in the future something like that might happen... and if the device in question has speech or braille output then this would be fantastic.

It would also stop sighted people having to peer at the menu in places like macdonalds, or the staff worrying about menus being moved damaged or lost. They wouldn't even need to print that many menus except for the technophobic fogeys.

Suppose it would take a form of wifi that could either push files to wireless enabled devices (with permission from the device naturally), or else just advertise the file to anyone in range without them having to mess about with finding a network drive. Sort of a publicly available read only wireless FTP server, only one that is available without any set up on the client device.

Saturday at the Boston Visually Impaired and Blind Users Group, I saw/heard a demo of the latest Kurzewil / NFB reading machine.
It's a cell phone.
Takes a picture of what you want to read.
Uses OCR to convert the text to speech.
We read hotel receipts, store coupons, the backs of food packages.
The demonstrator said he'd read wine bottles, but not beer bottles (sounds elitest.)
It was seriously cool.

Suspect it would have no problem with menus.

John Bannick

I've heard about the KNFB reader as it's called. If I remember correctly, I watched a youtube video about it, and it sounds great! But as you said CX2, it's insanely expensive!

That's so true, and I hate it.

I hate it too
my idea is that we need to put our values and what we believe in before dollars in cents, like for example, boycotting the olympics, not only because China has done some very bad things, the pollution in the city where it is being held is attrocious and the stadium that we are that it is being held at is poorly put together so that endangers the safety of the fans and players

sorry for the off topic message

It's just pathetic that they make things for people with disabilities much more expensive. It's like ok, so we have to work a little harder to put something accessible to the blind in, so they must also pay us lots of money. But if we don't have that, we are the ones who put extra time in doing things that other people can do just fine. And seriously I'm sure most of you will not buy it because of the prices, then, that effectively makes the device useless.