Thanks to Hable, blind and partially sighted people can also text, swipe and like

Ayushman Talwar's grandfather (27) was blind and therefore dependent on the help of others. Reading, walking, eating, paying: Talwar saw how needy his grandfather was. The introduction of the smartphone offered little relief. Although mobile phones are equipped with a voice control system that should offer a helping hand to blind and partially sighted people, according to Talwar, this appears to be insufficient in practice.

That is why he decided to develop a product that would allow blind people to app, scroll and like during his bachelor's degree in industrial design in India. "I built several prototypes, some kind of wooden boxes that you could stick on the back of a telephone. It still worked far from perfectly and the reactions were not that positive at all, but I was stubborn and kept trying to reduce the number of teething problems. I especially didn't want to give up. "

During his master's at Eindhoven University of Technology, Talwar bumped into his current partner Freek van Welsenis (23) and together they decided to further develop the Hable One. Slowly but surely, the die became more compact and user-friendly, so that enthusiasm among users increased. And so they continued to build on the workbenches of the university. Welsenis: "The criticism we received was annoying, but at the same time also super valuable because we learned from it again and again. You have to be open to it when you develop a new product; it is part of making mistakes and learning from them. That will not change as you progress in the development process, only the cycle is getting shorter and shorter. "