Innovation: 3 applications dedicated to the visually impaired

Bionic Vision, Dedicated Glasses, or Braille Tablets: These are some of the technologies that have emerged in recent years to help the visually impaired . With this same goal, more and more start-ups have, in turn, developed innovative applications that change the lives of the visually impaired. We review them!

Be My Eyes: lending your eyes to the visually impaired

Be My Eyes is first and foremost a free application for linking, as there are more and more. His concept? Facilitate contact between visually impaired people and a community of volunteers, ready to help them. Concretely, it is for these volunteers to guide the visually impaired in their daily activities: read for them an expiry date or the cooking time of a product, for example. Whenever someone says they need help, they receive a notification on their smartphone . They can choose to respond to it, which opens up a video conversation. Then they can simply describe to the visually impaired person what they are seeing.

The application has been around since 2015 and has already been a great success: 617,000 volunteers have already registered to help nearly 50,000 visually impaired people. Be My Eyes won the Oslo Innovation Week Award in 2017!

Aipoly Vision: changing the smartphone into a visual aid

For visually impaired people looking to gain even more autonomy, there is also the Aipoly Vision app. Here, they are no longer volunteers who describe their environment, but downright their smartphone ! To use it, they just scan an object with the camera on their phone. Using advanced visual recognition , artificial intelligence and voice assistance technologies , Aipoly 's servers will then analyze the object and send a description, which will be read aloud by the application . Concretely, it can therefore allow them to recognize an object, but also to have a more tangible perception of their environment, especially in the street (buildings, vehicles, road signs).

According to the start-up that set it up, incubated at the Singularité University in California, Aipoly Vision would already be able to identify thousands of objects at a speed of three per second. It is already available as a free download on the Apple Store and Google Play .

Darwin Reader: making reading easier for the visually impaired

Darwin Reader is a reading application , accessible to the visually impaired . Concretely, it allows to download books and to make them read aloud by a voice of synthesis. A very good news for visually impaired lovers of reading! To find books, it is possible to download them directly from the application (but there are currently few books in French), or to recover the ones that one already has on his computer, as long as they are in Daisy format (Digital Accessible Information System).

The application is already available on Google play for 10.95 €. Note that there is also a 30-day free trial version.

Over the years, more and more applications for the visually impaired should still develop! 😉