This App From Honor Can Help The Visually Impaired Read Texts And Road Signs

Ricky West is a well-known YouTuber in the UK, and he specializes in consumer technology. However, he is visually impaired.

What he suffers from is a condition known as septo-optic dysplasia, which is a congenital disorder of the optic nerve. In West’s case, his left eye has tunnel vision, meaning only his right eye can perceive light like that of an average person does.

The modern world is a hard to live place for people like him. Everywhere you look, there are road signs, and even in a restaurant, you have to read the menu to know what to order. These issues happen to visually impaired people in general.

However, recently, West found an unexpected solution to help him navigate the outside world from an unexpected place. It is an app from Honor, a sub-brand of Huawei.

The company announced the app, PocketVision, at a fringe event of this year’s IFA trade show. The app is backed by Huawei’s technology in cameras and AI to make texts easier to understand by people who have difficulty reading.

The secret here is the algorithms that behave line filters, which change the color of the texts so that they become easier to decipher by the visually impaired. Users have the choice to have white text on a black background, black text on a white background, and blue texts on a yellow background.

For some people, this kind of adjustment can make texts a lot easier to read.

PocketVision also has OCR support, which can digitalize the texts and read them out loud by a text-to-speech algorithm.

For now, the app is only available for Honor 20 Pro as this smartphone has all the compatible cameras needed for PocketVision to work.

People who want to use the app can find it on Huawei App Gallery in languages like English, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.