Target Market
Blind and visually impaired users
Competitive Landscape
VoiceOver (iOS) and TalkBack (Android) are built-in system screen readers for mobile devices, providing audible text and gesture controls.
Our apps don't recognize context like screen readers do; they provide only most common controls preventing use unintended functionality.
EasyReader app (iOS/Android) is designed for searching and playing audiobooks and texts from libraries for the visually impaired. But EasyReader has rich GUI, so blind users need screen readers to use it.
Our apps are designed to play audio, video (for sound playback), and text content from a wide variety of sources without use of screen readers.
YouTube app on any platform has the same problem for blind users.
Our YouTube player holds a context and does not require any additional tools.
Screen Readers for computers have huge number of hotkeys/shortcuts (JAWS > 200, NVDA - 150, Narrator - 50, VoiceOver - several hundred).
Our Windows apps have very minimalistic UI (voice menus, several conveniently located keys and TTS repeating voice commands and search conditions so the user can confirm or change the voice input.
Marketing and Sales
Our apps are free and promoted through social networks, blogs, media outlets and non-profit organizations that help our target audience.
Business Model
As a non-profit organization, we are considering funding from the government and/or charitable foundations.
The Team
- Irina Fikhgendler – idea’s author and MVP, https://www.linkedin.com/in/irina-fikhgendler-1605367
- Rafael Flickstein - co-author of ideas, MVP tester and user
- Denis Slepichev – full-stack and AI architecture consultant, https://www.linkedin.com/in/reddodo
- Natalie Slesuratin – Android dev consultant, https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalisl85
Milestones and Traction
Several types of apps have been developed for PC - playing radio streams, audiobooks, playlists including voice searching; playing media and playlists on YouTube; searching and listening textbooks from one of the most popular libraries.
All PC applications developed using PowerShell and Python following the above concept.
However, there is an urgent need to develop such applications for mobile devices.
Prototypes have been developed for Android including listening radio streams and Telegram channels or any other news/blogs via RSS - using Kotlin. Several libraries were created following the above concept as a tool for bulk development such kinds of apps: players with general common behavior, universal minimalist gesture library and possibility communicate to Google Assistant.
The next steps are:
- Finishing development of the core libraries (1 month)
- Providing series of apps based on the core libraries using both public and private content (2 – 3 months)
- Develop web site that provides apps to end-users. (1 – 2 months)
- Start advertising - more precisely, raising awareness of the target audience (after 2 – 3 month)
- Continued dev for all platforms and support - long-term perspective