In the 1980s, Wolfgang Zagler had a big goal: the new information technologies should support impaired people in their everyday lives.
Since his graduation, the electrical engineering graduate of the Vienna University of Technology belonged to the Institute of Industrial Electronics and Materials Science. His research on industrial pattern recognition helped him develop a reading device for blind and severely visually impaired people. In 1986, Zagler founded the Research Group for Rehabilitation Technology (FORTEC), which became the Center for Applied Assistive Technologies, which Zagler led until his retirement in September 2016.
In addition to the reader, Zagler and his team developed light and color recognition devices for the blind and various types of Braille displays, among other things. Zagler’s fully automated scanner for books (ScanRobot) was awarded the EU’s ICT Grand Prix at the CeBIT IT trade fair in 2007, and the company Treventus Mechatronics was founded in 2006 to market it.