2ndSight: Wayra Academy Start-Up Making Android Usable For The Visually Impaired

2ndSight: The Start-Up Making Android Usable For The Blind

The Wayra Academy in London is one of Europe's newest and most-exciting start-up labs.

The space houses 16 new businesses chosen from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants, and is just the latest local outpost of the Wayra brand, which also has incubators in South America and Spain.

Recently we visited the O2/Telefonica-sponsored Academy and chatted to the founders - but now it's time to learn about the businesses which are being built inside its walls.

Take a look at the latest interview, below, and follow the rest here.

First up is 2ndSight, a team attempting to make Android more usable for the visually impaired.

What's your idea?

2ndSight is mobile solution for the blind and visually impaired. It runs on top of Android operating system and features a specialised user interface that enables the blind to effectively use touchscreens. The user interface has been designed from scratch with thought of blind users first. The second part of the solution is the suite of apps that make everyday tasks easier for blind users. They share a unified user experience and tackle a number of problems like communication, navigation, everyday tasks (reading, note taking...).

How will it change Huffington Post UK's readers' lives?

In the UK there are around 300,000 blind people and around 1.8 million with sight loss. I bet a lot of them are reading Huffington Post and we'll provide them with awesome tools that will improve their quality of life. Once the whole platform is done we can play with it and add new apps... the Huffington Post audio reader app might be one of them!

What's the biggest challenge you face?

There isn't one big challenge but rather a couple of smaller but critical ones. We're moving the whole team from Slovenia to London in next few weeks to open the new company. We're entering a new market and we'll need to prove that our solution works in UK. If everything goes as planned we can start thinking about expansion.

What does success look like to your company?

Find a problem that's been bothering you and provide a solution for it. See how it changes people's lives.

Do you fear failure?

No. Failure for us is really first step in learning. See what works and what doesn't, then change the bad parts. All you need is a few victories among the defeats.

Away from tech, what inspires you?

I think the greatest inspirations are the problems that have not been solved yet (or have been solved poorly). The World is broken in many parts and it is an awesome feeling when you're trying to fix it.

How do you stay creative?

I don't know if we're especially creative, but the process in our company looks like this: we always start from the problem. Then we discuss it between ourselves and throw out the ideas. We select the best ones and work on them. It's more of iterative process.

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