NaviLens

Finalist category: Accessibility Award 2021

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Accessibility Award, Winner, 2021

NaviLens is a new way for visually impaired people to lead independent lives. Developed in Spain it has adopted by a range of brands, including Kellog’s, which has added the Navilens codes all their cereal boxes. It can be read over long distances, helping visually impaired people carry out everyday tasks from using public transport to supermarket shopping.

Hand holding a smartphone scannnng a NaviLens QR code

One of the great challenges a visually impaired person faces daily is autonomous movement in unknown spaces.

Public spaces such as train stations, hospitals, public buildings, education buildings, subways, etc., are particularly complex for a visually impaired person, since they are usually very open and unknown, and without GPS signal, which further complicates the orientation and makes their plenty autonomy impossible.

This situation forces that the blind person needs to memorize each path previously with the help of a third person, making challenging its mobility and inclusion. This is a big challenge for equal access to the opportunities for blind people and makes that the world of a visually-impaired person complex and limited.

Our goal is that this issue end all worldwide.

NaviLens is offering a completely different approach to create a more inclusive world for the visually impaired, with the main goal of achieving fully independent mobility in any space.

NaviLens proposition to solve this challenge, which affects 285 million people globally, is completely different and much more effective because it’s possible to make any space accessible, simply adding the NaviLens code.

Thanks to a very intense 5 years of research and development, NaviLens has achieved create a unique new artificial marker, the NaviLens code (similar in shape to QR codes but using colors to codify the information), that can be scanned by blind users from a long distance using any standard mobile phone without the need to focus.

The NaviLens code offers very accurate wayfinding for the blind users for autonomous indoors guidance, simulating the same behavior of how sighted people move indoors through their eyes using traditional signage.

NaviLens beats the scaling problem because it’s effortless to implement by any space owner very efficiently.

Any space only needs to DOWNLOAD, PRINT, and emplace the NaviLens codes in their spaces. For example, hundreds of schools easily have incorporated the free NaviLens codes to make their space accessible for blind students.

Thanks to this differentiated proposition, NaviLens could become universal signage for the visually impaired globally, in an equivalent way to the ubiquitous green EXIT sign is present in all the facilities of the world. NaviLens is a simple, effective, scalable, and powerful technology that can positively impact the lives of millions of visually impaired users around the world.

Our dream is to help create this new world, and winning this important award would help society realize that it is possible to achieve an inclusive world for the visually impaired through this efficient technological solution.

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