The first prototype of reading machine, called optophone, was developed by Dr. Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe of Birmingham University in 1913.
Their first attempts to improve the optophone all ended in failures,[2] and users were still unable to read more than 5 words per minutes in average, even after long training sessions.
[1] This observation led Liberman to suppose that the limitation was cognitive rather than technical, and to formulate his motor theory of speech perception.
"[3] In the mid-1960s, Francis F. Lee joined Dr. Samuel Jefferson Mason's Cognitive Information Processing Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on a reading machine for the blind, the first system that would scan text and produce continuous speech.
[4] Early reading machines were desk-based and large, found in libraries, schools, and hospitals or owned by wealthy individuals.