visually impaired
WeWalk raises cash to bring computer vision to smart cane for visually impaired people
WeWalk, a U.K.-based startup developing a “smart cane” for visually impaired people, today announced it has raised £2 million ($2.4 million) in venture funding from several notable institutional and angel…
Waymap’s app helps the visually impaired navigate public transit
London-based Waymap wants to help guide visually impaired people to navigate their surroundings, and it’s starting with public transit. The company just concluded a closed two-week trial of its navigation…
Microsoft’s PeopleLens project helps blind kids learn social cues in conversation
Among the challenges of growing up with a visual impairment is learning and participating in the social and conversational body language used by sighted people. PeopleLens is a research project…
Ashirase, a Honda incubation, reveals advanced walking assistance system for visually impaired
The system aims to help users achieve more independence in their daily lives by allowing them to feel which way to walk through in-shoe vibrations connected to a navigation app…
This tactile display lets visually impaired users feel on-screen 3D shapes
Using a computer and modern software can be a chore to begin with for the visually impaired, but fundamentally visual tasks like 3D design are even harder. This Stanford team…
ObjectiveEd is building a better digital curriculum for vision-impaired kids
Children with vision impairments struggle to get a solid K-12 education for a lot of reasons — so the more tools their teachers have to impart basic skills and concepts,…
Get the latest TC stories read to you over the phone with BrailleVoice
It can be a pain for the visually impaired to keep up with your favorite publications the way sighted app users do. BrailleVoice is a project that puts the news…
Microsoft Soundscape helps the visually impaired navigate cities
Microsoft today launched Soundscape, a new iOS app that aims to give people who are blind or visually impaired a greater awareness of their surrounding by using 3D cues. It’s…
MIT develops a vibrating wearable to help people with visual impairments navigate
For such a simple tool, the white cane has been incredibly enduring. With all of the technological advances that have been made over the past century, we haven’t come up…
BackMap helps people who are visually impaired navigate cities and indoor areas
I’m not sure what it would be like to navigate the streets of New York if I were visually impaired, but I imagine it would not be the most comfortable…
OxSight uses augmented reality to aid the visually impaired
One percent of the world’s population, approximately 70 million people, are blind. That is not a huge number when you think of it in terms of a potential use base…
App lets visually impaired in India hear books in their native language
For the millions upon millions of visually impaired people in India, it can be difficult getting hold of the audiobook they want in the language they need it in. A…
Unseen Art Is Crowdfunding An Open Source Platform To Make Fine Art Accessible Via 3D Printing
Making art more accessible to blind and visually impaired people is founder Marc Dillon’s new mission. After almost a quarter century working in the mobile industry — latterly at alternative…
Aipoly Puts Machine Vision In The Hands Of The Visually Impaired
It’s 3.30am in the featureless Singularity University meeting room I’m peering into via Skype and I’ve just asked Marita Cheng to take a photo of the buttons on her co-founder,…
Can iBeacons Be Used To Help The Visually Impaired Navigate Public Transport?
London-based digital design studio ustwo is working on a project with the Royal London Society for Blind People (RLSB) to determine whether iBeacons/Bluetooth Low Energy beacon technology can be used…
Amazon Adds New Features For Blind And Visually Impaired Users To Kindle For iOS App, Coming To Other Platforms Soon
Amazon today announced a number of new features for its Kindle for iOS app that aim to make it easier to use for blind and visually impaired users. Today’s update,…
New technology lets visually impaired people sing karaoke, too
Two companies from the motherland of Karaoke, Japan, partnered up to develop a new Karaoke system that is tailor-made to meet the demands of the blind and visually impaired. Tokyo-based…