I always like to see products that make it possible for people to do things they would otherwise find difficult or impossible. So when I was looking over the entries in this year's Last Gadget Standing competition, I was very intrigued by the OrCam MyEye, a device that can read text and give information about other items to people who are visually impaired or have a reading disability. I've had the chance to try out the device over the past couple of weeks, and am quite impressed. Luckily, I don't need to use such a product, but it seems to me that the MyEye is an incredibly useful tool for people with those impairments.

The current version, the MyEye 2.0, is surprisingly small. About the size of a finger, the battery-powered, self-contained device is easily attached to a pair of glasses, via a magnetic clip that comes with the product. It includes a camera, speaker, and all the computing power it needs to operate as a self-contained unit—you don't need to connect to the Internet or a smartphone for it to work. (You can, however, get updates over the Internet.)

With the MyEye turned on, I could hold up a book or just about any reading material, point to what I wanted to read, and the device would simply speak the words aloud. I tried this with a variety of different kinds of text, and it generally worked fine on all of them. I tried it on books (Grant by Ron Chernow), computer screens, physical newspapers, and plain paper, all with pretty good results.

In practice, you usually focus the device by pointing your finger at the text that you want the MyEye to read. When the device recognizes the spot, it beeps; you can then remove your finger, and MyEye takes a picture of the text and begins reading a couple of lines above where your finger was. To make it stop reading, you hold up your hand. There are other reading modes as well, including some which read a whole page (these I found most useful for books or sheets of paper), and a method called "touch reading" that helps you follow text in something like a newspaper, which does have a bit of a learning curve.

It's not always perfect. For example, and depending on the font, at times the MyEye seemed not to notice the apostrophe in a possessive, and would pronounce "China's" as "China-ess." The voice can seem a bit robotic, especially when trying to pronounce unfamiliar words, like technical or proper names; it's not quite as smooth as some text-to-speech systems I've seen, but overall, it's pretty good. I do wish it had a headphone jack, so it would be less disruptive in places where others are working. These are minor quibbles that I would like to see addressed in the next version.

The MyEye also features face recognition. The system can learn a face by having someone stand in front of you and turn his or her head from side to side. From then on, the system will recognize the person. For new faces the system hasn't learned, it can recognize the basics, whether it is a man, woman, or child.

The MyEye can also recognize colors, currencies, and some bar codes on products.

I didn't find it very difficult to learn to use the product, but I have reasonable eyesight. OrCam says users typically go through a one- to two-hour training session, and that it takes people a few weeks to grow completely comfortable with the device. They note that while I typically used the MyEye at a normal reading speed of 160 to 180 words per minute, many visually impaired people like to increase the speed to 250 to 300 words per minute.

With a retail price of $4,500, it's not inexpensive, but the company says the device is an approved/fully-funded assistive technology by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and that over twenty VA centers have staff members trained to use it.

Obviously, this isn't a product for everyone, but for those who are visually impaired or have other kinds of reading disabilities, MyEye could be quite useful. Despite its small size, it's a completely standalone product, so it should be easier for the intended audience to use. Overall, it's the best product for this category I've seen yet.