ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Today the Kurzweil 3000 firefly app was released for the iPad. Click here to download the free app. The app, firefly, is the iPad version of Kurzweil's cloud-based reader and file storage product. If you have a firefly account all of your saved documents will be available to read on the iPad as well as any Mac or PC. Watch the video above to see firefly in action. Click here to learn more about firefly.

Firefly has many useful reading features, but will not replace the full desktop version of Kurzweil. Similar to the desktop version of Kurzweil, firefly highlights words as they are read, which makes following along easier. Firefly includes high quality text-to-speech voices. Users can adjust the text-to-speech rate and highlighting options with ease. The interface is extremely clean and simple to learn. The app can read documents with images and rich text formatting. Firefly is a simple and easy way for teachers to distribute accessible instructional materials to their students with dyslexia or physical disabilities. While firefly is ideal for reading documents, it does not offer any annotation features such as highlighting, text entry, note taking or speech notes. Also, documents cannot be added to the firefly app directly from the iPad using the "open in" feature. It would be very cool if firefly offered the ability to scan documents using the iPad's camera and then read the document using optical character recognition (OCR).

The firefly iPad app is a must have for current firefly web users. If you do not have a web account you can still try out sample documents from within the app. For people who do not want to be tied to a computer all of the time the iPad app is also very useful. If you are not a current Kurzweil 3000 user but do not have firefly the new app may be a compelling reason to get a firefly web license. Click read more below to view screen shots of firefly.