Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute

Ask Chloe to Read the Label on Your Prescription Bottles

July 4, 2018 3:00 am

A recent collaboration between the AT&T Foundry for Connected Health (located in the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute) and Aira, which makes smart glasses for people who are blind or have low vision, now has a solution to reading the tiny print on prescription bottles. read more

Spotlight Interview with the Founder of Spotlight Gateway: A Project That Provides Free iPads to the Visually Impaired.

In this Spotlight interview, James Oates sits down with Dr. Howard Kaplan, a retina surgeon, and the developer of Spotlight Text. Spotlight Text is an app that works with Bookshare to make eBooks accessible to the visually impaired. The app displays white text on a black background, and can make the text as large as a reader needs. It works only on iPads, but can also be airplayed to a TV screen by way of a dongle or an Apple TV. This allows for much larger text than can be provided with normal magnification software. The application also works with VoiceOver and braille displays, so that anyone with a visual impairment can use it. Working in cooperation with Bookshare, the app can access more than 450,000 books, and this number is constantly rising.
To ensure that students with visual impairments have access to printed materials, Dr. Kaplan has founded Spotlight Gateway, an organization that provides free access to his app, a free Bookshare membership, and a free iPad to those who are in financial need. Students need to be certified as having a visual impairment by a licensed Ophthalmologist, and they need to show that there is a financial need for the program.
You can try out a light version of the application to see if it works for you.