Digital technologies have become pervasive in our daily lives and have fundamentally changed the ways we communicate and interact with information and with each other. We now have access to digital content anytime, anywhere and in a palette of formats, ranging from images, videos, text, and speech to virtual and augmented reality experiences.
Typically, this has made smartphones, and similar mobile devices, an invaluable source of information and a mean of connection to the world and to others. Yet, by relying almost exclusively on visual and auditory feedbacks, these devices pose evident accessibility issues.

Current smartphones and tablets provide accessibility features, but mostly in the form of text-to-speech, which can be impractical and affect literacy, and through connectivity to refreshable Braille displays, which involve an additional peripheral, often bulky and expensive or when small too limited. These devices still prevent the visually impaired access to graphical content and complex notations.

SRUK Health Innovation team plans to tackle this problem head-on and provide solution by collaborating in making of “HAPTIC TABLET FOR THE ACCESSIBILITY OF DIGITAL CONTENT TO THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED” – EU funded project and first win in the Horizon Project category for SRUK.

SRUK Health Innovation team will be extensively working on combining and extending AI approaches to analyze and detect all relevant information to enable visually impaired people to create a mental model of the image comparable to sighted users along with use AI for image manipulation and translation and create a public dataset for the training of a model that will enable a system to automatically generate tactile images. The final delivery from SRUK team would be AI algorithm for predictive writing for visually impaired.