WatVision

Our Goal

To create a product that will allow a visually impaired person to interact with any touch screen.
Touch screens are becoming more and more common in everyday life. Airplanes, movie theatres, grocery stores, mall directories and more all use touch screens to provide services. Unfortunately these touch screens often do not have any accessible features for someone who is unable to clearly see all of its elements. In general touch screens aren't accessible to someone who is visually impaired, and we aim to change that.

Recently WatVision has become open source. The entirety of the source code is now available on Github under the MIT license. The goal for this change was to ensure that the technology would be available to any other developers who would want to pursue this project further, or add accessibility to their own projects.

View the Source Code Here:

WatVision Source Code

The James Dyson Award is an annual competition which has the goal: 'design something that solves a problem'. This open ended Engineering Design award was made to encourage engineering, and innovation.

The WatVision team is incredibly proud to have won the James Dyson 2018 award at the national level. The WatVision design competed with different engineering solutions from all over Canada.

Here are a small selection of the articles written about this achievement:

• Engineering students’ project captures national Dyson award - University of Waterloo
• Waterloo developed app that helps visually impaired wins award - Kitchener Today
• Please search for: 'WatVision James Dyson Award' if you want to learn more!

The WatVision team presented at the University of Waterloo Mechatronics Symposium and won two awards: The General Motors Innovation award, and also 2nd place in the People's Choice award.

The team aims to ensure that this technology becomes available to as many people as possible in the future, and any further news will be posted on this site, or you can subscribe to be notified by email below. Stay tuned!