Optacon

The Optacon (Optical to Tactile CONverter) is an electromechanical device to permit blind people to read printed material that has not been transcribed into Braille. The Optacon consists of a main electronics unit about the size of a portable tape recorder connected by a thin cable to a lens module about the size of a penknife. The main electronics unit contains a "tactile array" onto which the blind person places his/her index finger. The Optacon user moves the lens module across a line of print, and the image under the lens module is transmitted via the connecting cable to the main electronics unit. The tactile array in the main electronics unit contains a matrix of tiny metal rods which are vibrated to form a magnified tactile representation of the image being viewed by the lens module. As the user moves the lens module along the print line, an image roughly the size of one print letter is felt moving across the tactile array from right to left under the user's finger. The Optacon includes a knob to adjust the intensity at which the tactile array rods vibrate, a knob to set the image brightness threshold needed to turn on the vibration of the rods in the tactile array, and a switch that determines whether images will be interpreted as dark print on a light background or as light print on a dark background.

The Optacon was first marketed in 1970 by Telesensory Systems Inc. of Mountain View, California, USA. It was the brain child of John Linvill, chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University, and it was developed with researchers at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI, Inc.). It was initially developed for use by Linvill's daughter, Candy (born 1952, blind since the age of 3). Using the Optacon, Candy graduated from Stanford and got a PhD. She has worked as a clinical psychologist since, so, like her father, she is often referred to in the press as "Dr Linvill".

Linvill was one of Telesensory's founders. (By coincidence, Candy Linvill married TSI's first president, Chris Berg.) Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Optacon underwent upgrades, including the development of a new model, known as the Optacon II, which featured improved capabilities to interface to a computer. In the 1990s Telesensory increasingly shifted its emphasis toward the low-vision market and became less devoted to the Optacon. Page scanners with optical character recognition had come to be the tool of choice for blind people wanting access to print. Page scanners were less expensive and had a much shallower learning curve than the Optacon. In addition, blind people could generally read through material more quickly with a page scanner than with an Optacon. In 1996 Telesensory announced that it would no longer manufacture the Optacon and that it would cease to service the device in 2000. Many users purchased used machines and cannibalized them for parts, presumably with much help from sighted, electromechanically-talented friends. In March 2005, TSI suddenly shut down. Employees were "walked out" of the building and lost accrued vacation time, medical insurance, and all benefits. Customers could not buy new machines or get existing machines fixed. Some work was done by other companies to develop an updated version of the Optacon to reduce the cost of the device and take advantage of newer technology, but no device with the versatility of the Optacon had been developed as of 2007.

Many blind people continue to use their Optacons to this day. The Optacon offers capabilities that no other device offers including the ability to see a printed page or computer screen as it truly appears including drawings, typefaces, and specialized text layouts.