Sensible Innovations is excited to announce that we will be providing the audio guides at two major, upcoming, conferences in the US next month. The first, M-Enabling Summit Conference and Showcase 2016 takes place in Washington DC on June 13 and 14. The M-Enabling Summit is the only program exclusively dedicated to promoting mobile accessible and assistive application and services for senior citizens and users of all abilities. This is an annual meeting for all those who create and contribute to accessible ICT products, services and consumer technologies. With its theme of Accessible Technologies and Environments for All the 2016 M-Enabling Summit is set to provide a platform for empowering

I just read this wonderful article about a team effort between Purdue University students and students at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI). Purdue engineering students in the university’s EPICS program, a program devoted to helping meet community needs, are working with ISBVI’s high school students to improve education for those with visual impairments or blindness. Projects they’re currently working on include a device that turns braille writing into text so that teachers can review work a student as done in the format they’re used to and provide feedback more readily. These students are doing truly important work. With projects like theirs, AWARE and other tec

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day devoted awareness for the technological advancements providing greater accessibility for those with disabilities. That’s exactly what AWARE is all about. AWARE uses iBeacons and the existing technology in smartphones to provide audio-based guidance and information to users. Because people with visual impairments or blindness should absolutely have the same access to information as sighted people. Everyone should be able to readily know that they have happened upon a coffee shop, to learn about a new business in town that they’ve discovered by walking past, to get to explore and discover the world around them without having to memorize a map

On Tuesday, we performed an Aware installation that makes me so proud. We installed Aware at the Mary Bryant Home for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Springfield, Illinois. The Mary Bryant Home is named for a young girl in the 1800s who lost her sight to scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. At 15 years old, she evacuated her fellow students, all blind, from their school during a fire. The home is a supported living facility where those with blindness or visual impairments can live independently while still getting any necessary care required as well as the companionship of others with the same condition. We worked with the home to install Aware throughout the facility. Now, residents can sim

Rasha Said launched Sensible Innovations to help improve the lives of America’s almost 21 million visually impaired. In 2015, the mom of three created the AWARE Audible Proximity App, an iOS app using iBeacon technology, to help the visually impaired more fully experience their surroundings in real time and navigate public spaces via voice instruction. The app, which she launched from her office in Springfield just months ago, has already proved successful in a test pilot program at Glenwood High School, a public school in Chatham. Sensible Innovations is now building upon that real-world experience by rolling out the product nationwide. Rasha created the AWARE concept out of a glaring need

In March, I was so pleased to be able to take part in the 31st Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference at California State University Northridge (CSUN). The feedback we received from people who visited our booth was just incredible. The team from WebAble.tv was there and was able to capture one of our demonstrations, this one featuring activist Albert Rizzi, who is blind. “This is a fantastic tool. This is gonna open so many doors. The applications that I see for this are so far reaching,” Albert said. “Having come [to this conference] for years, I have never been able to walk the floor confidently enough to wanna be by myself. I think I would totally do it w