I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc… neat!

https://navilens.com

EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we’re discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.

  • smotherlove@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Let me guess, absolutely proprietary?

    spits

    There is something so fucking sinister about public infrastructure relying on closed source accessibility tools.

    • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You make a simple app and the company pays you small fee every time a scan results in a purchase. You also sell users’ data because you obviously track all of that. Now companies selling accessibility products can target the customer with ads. Success!

      It’s easier than applying for grants, and no one seems to mind this kind of economy. It’s just a win/win. That is, it actually helps the visually impaired, and no one seems to care about being tracked or installing an app. “So what’s the problem?” /s?

      It could have just been a QR code that links to a web page, but then who’s going to pay for it? Back to begging for grant money. I work with a non-profit. Applying for grants is a full time job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

        • fishos@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          And they’re known by everyone and widely used as the standard, riiiiiiight?

          You probably don’t know about most the ones that aren’t doing fine, cus, you know, they aren’t doing so well.

          • otacon239@feddit.de
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            9 months ago

            Hmmmm. I certainly can’t think of any…

            • Linux (including its distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora)
            • Apache HTTP Server
            • Mozilla Firefox
            • LibreOffice
            • VLC
            • GIMP
            • Blender
            • WordPress
            • MySQL
            • Python
            • Git
            • Docker
            • TensorFlow
            • Kubernetes

            While these names may not be on the forefront of the public’s mind, they’re still insanely ubiquitous. There’s no reason this needed to be a proprietary tracking service. Especially not one that takes advantage of those with disabilities.