Imagine standing in your own kitchen and holding two cans you can’t tell apart. One is soup while the other is dog food. There’s no one at home to ask and the only way to know is to open them. It’s a small and deeply human problem but for millions of people living with vision loss, some version of it is simply every day.
This is the part of blindness that rarely makes it into the conversation. Not the big challenges but the endless little ones. The unread letter on the table, the expiry date you can’t check, the menu the waiter rushes through or the friend waving from across a cafe who slowly assumes you’re ignoring them. They might not seem dangerous but they quietly chip away something precious which is the feeling of moving through your own life on your own terms.
Let’s step into the journey of SMARTON where a personal experience of a founder prompted the creation of an accessibility solution.
Reading the world aloud:
Founded in 2018 by Suket Amin, Deep Parmar and Ravi Jadav, Sunbots Innovations LLP wants to build a future of total autonomy for the visually impaired people through one of their solutions, SMARTON.
One fine morning, a family member of Mr. Suket Amin was moving through a still-dark house and walked into a door hard enough to be briefly stunned. Fortunately, there were no injuries but his half-asleep reassurance that he could just build a pair of smart glasses so it would never happen again refused to stay a throwaway line. It came straight back to him when he got a response, “If you can actually build it, why aren’t you doing it?”
While assistive technology hadn’t been anywhere on the roadmap but a visit to a local organization working with blind children completely shifted the perspective. Watching the kids navigate the small and relentless obstacles of an ordinary day, he realized that the same technology being poured into cars could be pointed at something far more immediate. The team left certain they had to build this.
SMARTON is a mobile application with accessibility features such as voice control, scene description, object recognition and more that aims to enable visually impaired people to enhance their daily life. It integrates with third-party smart glasses through SDK partnerships. They enter into partnerships with impact-driven organizations to deploy the solution and include more beneficiaries.
“Our philosophy is absolute: digital access should require nothing more than a voice command. From ordering daily meals and booking rides to reading physical books and managing daily tasks, our virtual assistant handles it all seamlessly. We aren’t just building an assistive tool; we are designing a world of total autonomy for the visually impaired.” – says Mr. Suket Amin (Co-Founder, Sunbots Innovations LLP)
The view from here:
It’s worth ending by clearing up what blindness actually is because most sighted people picture it wrong. It’s rarely the total darkness we imagine. Vision loss is a spectrum. The majority of people the world calls “blind” still perceive light, shapes or movement. They aren’t living in a void. They’re navigating a world that simply isn’t built for their range of sight.
Part of it is solvable with surgery and glasses. Part of it is solvable with assistive technology and part of it is solvable simply by living, designing and speaking as though the people around us might not see the way we do. That’s the useful thing to carry away. For a remarkable number of people, sight is closer than we tend to assume and for those who live without it, a fuller and more independent life is closer still.
For readers who want to look closer, the World Health Organization’s fact sheet on blindness and vision impairment is a great place to start.
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