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The long-awaited Ultra Cane, now in production, was on display at the Sight Village show of technology for blind and partially-sighted people. It cost �1m to develop and gives tactile feedback through the handgrip by using sonar to detect obstacles.

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Guide is a new software suite that provides speech output and screen magnification in a package that includes the usual office applications. It was designed after a family friend of the software developer lost their sight.

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Optima was showing the Flipper at the exhibition. It is a battery powered LCD colour screen combined with a rotating camera that can magnify text or distant objects like white boards.

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Continuing the reading theme, Tagarno have combined CCTV and optical character recognition in the Live Reader to process complex documents and provide magnified text and speech output.

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Portset have a new document reader which scans quickly and provides high-quality synthesised speech output. It runs from a 12v external power supply, has an internal 30GB hard disc and can be connected to other devices like CD drives.

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The Tactile Tablet has been developed by the Royal College for the Blind. It provides an interactive learning experience by combining tactile pictures with educational software and gives audio output when different parts of the tablet are touched.

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Dolphin have created the Easepublisher authoring tool which allows fully accessible, multimedia content to be created. It uses the internationally recognised DAISY standard and can be used for audio books, training materials or public records.