The Quicklook
An article in the New York Times about the Quicklook, an $800 device for people losing their sight which uses a small digital video camera and an LCD display screen to magnify any text up to 1-inch high. Though speed-reading might lead to a case of carpal-tunnel, Quicklook can help users maintain their pre-vision-loss reading ability, as opposed to turning to goods like big-text books or books-on-tape, which let's admit, are kind of like giving up. Plus, you can use it to read all sorts of things that don't come in a large-print edition (like, um, this weblog). Anyway, with 16 million Americans stuck with uncorrectable vision, and The National Eye Institute suggesting that that number will double in 30 years (as all those damn baby-boomers get old), easy-to-use vision-aides are going to become a hefty market.
