The Dr. Bill Takeshita Foundation

Last Modified: Wed, 23 Apr 2008

Humanware Victor Reader Stream

The Humanware Victor Reader Stream is arguably one of the most helpful new technological devices released in 2008. The Victor Stream is a compact portable talking book player, MP3 player, voice recorder, and text reader that fit easily in your pocket. Better than an I-Pod, the Victor Reader Stream can play your favorite music, read your text files from Microsoft Word, read Daisy and other books, and also record your voice messages. Most importantly, the Victor Stream is completely accessible for the blind.

The Victor Reader Stream is about the size of a deck of playing cards. It has a keypad and a few other buttons that allow you to go quickly to specific pages of a book and to make book marks for you to later refer to. The Victor Reader uses a small SD memory card that can store up to 8 gigabytes of information. This amount of storage allows users to take thousands of their favorite songs and multiple books with them wherever they go. The Victor organizes the content into four basic bookshelves. One book shelf store Daisy books, the advanced format of books that allows readers to quickly locate and jump to specific chapters, sections, and pages. This makes reading significant faster than when reading with books on tape. The second shelf will store books such as books that have been recorded on MP3 or text files that users have typed with their word processor. This feature is especially helpful because it allows users to study their notes that they have typed on their home computer. The third book shelf contains music files while the fourth book shelf stores voice recordings.

We have found the Victor Reader to be an excellent device to read books, documents, voice recordings, and music. The Victor Reader allows users to quickly and easily transfer documents from their computers to the SD card without using any intermediary software. We especially appreciated this as compared to trying to transfer music using I-tunes with an I-Pod. We found the Victor Reader to be very easy to use and the ability to have the Victor read the files aloud made it very easy to find music CDs and other files we wanted to listen. We believe that at $329, the Victor Reader Stream is a tremendous value and a most usable device for school, work, and play.