Blind people are well able to converse in speech and are also able to produce printed messages using specially adapted typewriters. However, when they receive printed or handwritten communications they are severely disadvantaged. There are currently many optical character readers' (OCR's) on the market that are able to read single or multi-font machine-printed characters. It is also a relatively easy task to interface a speech synthesisor to OCR's. These character readers then have an output that is in a suitable form for a blind person. A text reader is being developed that reads handprinted characters and provides a synthesised speech output. The novel feature of the text reader is that it is able to learn by experience and therefore continually improve its reading performance.