Journal Article

Federal Support for the Development of Speech Synthesis Technologies: A Case Study of the Kurzweil Reading Machine

Bell, Sarah A

2023

Overview

This case study situates an early text-to-speech computer developed for blind persons, the Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), within a broader history of speech synthesis technologies. Though typically no more than a footnote in the technical history of speech synthesis, the KRM was still a powerful symbol of innovation that reveals how disability can be used as a pretext for funding technology development. I argue that various boosters held the KRM up as a symbol of technological solutionism that promised to fully enroll blind people into the US political economy. However, the success of the KRM as a symbol belies its technical flaws, the federal subsidies needed to bring it to fruition, and the structural barriers to its use that were elided by its utopian promise.

• Publisher: University of Texas Press,University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
• Subject: Adaptive technology / Blind people / Blindness / Brochures / Case studies / Collaboration / Cronkite, Walter / Deafness / Disability / Funding / Innovations / Inventors / Kurzweil, Ray / Political activism / Political economy / Readers / Reading aids for the blind / Society / Speech / Speech recognition / Speech synthesis / Subsidies / Symbolism / Symbols / Text-to-speech