The ingenuity of Tracy Phillips, an 18-year-old senior of Long Beach High in Lido Beach, New York, usa, has ensured that sightless people are no longer bamboozled. Tracy has invented a wallet-sized gadget which reads the number in the corner of a currency bill and announces it over a little speaker. An infrared beam scans the bill, passing over the corner where the amount is written. The pattern of ink detected by the beam is matched against those stored in a computer chip. The result is then fed into a voice-synthesis chip.
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