A cab, a meal, a new outfit, bank transactions are just a few screen taps away with smartphones. But navigating the digital world can be slow and cumbersome for a visually-impaired person.

Identifying this problem, entrepreneur and engineer Vijay Raghav Varada has developed a Braille keypad called 'Tipo’ which can be attached to smartphones to improve accessibility.

Vijay has been interested in making devices accessible to the blind since 2014 and it was while working on a project on Braille laptops for keyboards that he learnt of the smartphone problem.

With its 25 features, the glasses will help the visually impaired identify people around them.

People with visual impairments will soon be able to wear smart glasses that will help them read currencies and books, and choose their daily outfits independently.

'Amal' smart glasses, which will be released in the UAE market next month, will enable people with visual impairment to live without assistance and lead independent lives.

A FEATURE of the city’s bus service app, which was launched Wednesday, enables visually impaired riders to use their phone’s voice command function to acquire the latest public bus service information.

After visually impaired riders enter Setup Interface and select auxiliary mode on the app, “鹏城公交” (péng chéng gōng jiāo), will switch to a simplified edition that announces detailed bus route information and real-time bus service information broadcasts, according to Shenzhen Municipal Public Transport Bureau, the developer of the app, at a news conference Wednesday.

Blind and visually-impaired people in the country can now read any printed Nepali characters using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which was launched on Monday.

The software, developed by two IT experts from the Kathmandu University (KU) for the Nepal Netra Joyti Sangh in financial support of the Australian government, was launched by Australian Ambassador to Nepal, Peter Budd, amid a function.