Organisation:
Trestle Labs
Location:
Gandhinagar, Gujarat | Bengaluru, Karnataka
Problem:
57 million Visually-impaired people in India (12 million Blind [Src: National Programme for Control of Blindness], 45 million Low-vision) don’t have equal Education and Employment opportunities as they cannot access Printed, Handwritten and Digital content on their own. Only 29.16% are part of the education-system and only 6.86% schools have access to braille and audio content [survey by NCERT].
EDUCATION:
They are heavily reliant on Braille and Audio-books to access information. While less than 1% content is available in Braille, it takes 4-6 weeks to audio-record a 300-page book. Late Blind individuals often don’t learn Braille.
EMPLOYMENT:
A significant % of employable visually-impaired are unemployed. Even those who are employed don’t have the right tools to enhance their productivity, limiting their career-growth.
EXPERIENCE:
Imagine how you read a book – open it’s index, choose a chapter, start reading, move back and forth across pages. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, you look for it on Google, YouTube. While preparing for exams, you underline things, make notes.
But, for visually-impaired people- They get a book, wait for weeks to get it audio-recorded; listen to the same 2-hour audio-book 7-8 times before their exams – No notes, No content-interactiveness, No peer-learning.
Solution:
Ms. Akshita and team have developed their solution ‘Kibo – A one-stop solution to access any kind of printed, handwritten and digital content’.
Kibo comprises 2 products:
● Kibo mobile-app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trestle.labs.kibo)
● Kibo XS device (https://youtu.be/5g2J1dEV9TE)
Kibo mobile-app is a one-stop solution to access any kind of Printed, Handwritten and Digital content, in real-time, through audio, across multiple Indian and overseas languages, with an immersive reading and learning experience at par with sighted peers.
While bringing access to 1 Million+ accessible books in collaboration with online digital-libraries to download and listen in audio, it also reads any digital document – PDF, ePub, Daisy, Docx, Txt, Images and Audio across multiple Indian and overseas languages.
While Kibo mobile-app also offers Capture and Read feature, not many of our Visually-impaired friends are dextrous enough to capture photos using their phone, and the task is even tougher when the content is huge (for Higher-education, Competitive-exams and Workplace scenarios).
So, for Educational and Workplace scenarios, we have developed Kibo XS which is a table-lamp like device that reads any Printed and Handwritten Content across 12 Indian and multiple overseas languages in real-time through audio, translates text across 100+ languages and helps download the same across Editable formats like Doc, Docx and even PDF, while giving an option to save the documents on Kibo-cloud for multi-device access.
Scalability and Impact:
Our impact lies in empowering the Blind and Visually-impaired community towards inclusive Education and Employment as well as overall well-being by enabling real-time access to any Printed, Handwritten and Digital content through audio across multiple Indian and overseas languages.
On our quest to empower millions of visually-impaired people around the globe, currently our Kibo app has empowered 21,000+ Visually-impaired people across 15 countries who have read more than 1.7 million+ documents and spent 10 million+ minutes of reading and learning time on Kibo. As of August 2020, our Kibo XS device is deployed across 3 countries, 14 states in India with 120+ happy customers
With the Plug-and-play support for adding more languages, we wish to scale our impact to multiple geographies and are seeking like-minded global partnerships to scale our impact.
Financial Requirements:
We would like to partner with like minded individuals and organizations willing to support us through market access to Schools, Universities, NGOs who could potentially benefit through Kibo
Awards and Recognition:
Some of the recognition for us includes those 25+ user-generated tutorials on Kibo app and Kibo XS device which have over 10,000+ views. This is a true testimony of how our users love us.
Some of our awards includes:
- Winner | Maharashtra Startup Week 2020 (Education & Skilling)
- Winner | LIF Fellowship Pitch Day 2020 | Royal Academy of Engineering, London, UK
- Winners | Tata Social Enterprise Challenge (TSEC) 2020, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park
- Winners | Social Alpha Quest for Assistive Technologies 2019 (MPhasis, BIRAC, Tata Trusts)
- Rashtriya Swayamsiddh Samman 2019, JSPL Foundation
- Best Indian Social Enterprise Award 2019, Action for India (AFI)
- Winners | Pitch Day 2019 | Women Entrepreneurship and Empowerment (WEE Foundation)
- Winners | Nasscom Design4 India Award 2018
- Winners | National Conference on Social Innovation 2018 | Pune International Centre