Roy Daniell was just 10 years old when he was diagnosed with rod-cone dystrophy, an eye condition that leads to gradual blindness. Now he's one of the first Canberrans to use new technology that turns his glasses into a minicomputer, scanning and reading information for him.
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"By the time I was in year 10 at school, I couldn't read normal text and basically I've had a large blank spot in the middle of my vision ever since," Mr Daniell said.
"I've got reasonably good peripheral vision so I don't trip over things much which is kind of good but I can't see where I'm going."
The now 52-year-old is one of the first Canberrans to use the OrCam MyEye, a new device that is clipped onto a pair of glassess and reads to the wearer.
It has a camera, a speaker and a cable that hooks up to a bigger device that is roughly the size of a smartphone and can be put into a persons pocket. When a user points to text, the OrCam scans the words and speaks it into the user's ear.
"I've been frustrated with the digital read technology in products, it's often hard to just go back and just read on paragraph.
"Sometimes you've actually just go over the whole page again and these things but the good thing about the OrCam is that you can point to a particular part of the page and have it read part of the page to you which is kind of nice."
Another feature of the devices is that wearers can train the tech to remember up to 100 faces. The device will tell you the name of the person if you've previously recorded the face. And if it's an unknown person, it's going to give you hints like "a young woman is in front of you".
Mr Daniell, a musculoskeletal physiotherapist in Belconnen, has his office equipped with gadgets and tools that help people with vision impairments. He said he had tried many technologies to assist him with his everyday activities, including studying for his postgraduate studies.
"I've been looking at a way to access documents and there are lots of technologies," he said.
"The beauty of this thing is it's really mobile and it works really quickly so as you say you just put it in front of the document and within 10 seconds it just started reading the document to you."
The Orcam can also identify objects. A simple trip to the local supermarket can be difficult for Mr Daniell.
"I do most of the grocery shopping in my family and I often come home from the supermarket with bizarre things that looked a bit like the thing that I was after," he said
"It's always good for a chuckle when we eat what it was and it wasn't going to be the thing we thought it was going to be."
