Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Oakville based, AbleDocs Inc., is currently the global leader in text accessibility services for persons living with specialized vision-ability requirements. They wish to broaden their market reach by addressing the every-day needs for persons with low-vision. In the case of this collaboration with Seneca, they are targeting text accessibility in the context of the in-store shopping experience. AbleDocs' challenge in addressing this market need is to adapt their text accessibility technology to make retail and product information immediately visually-accessible, in-store. The intention of the proposed collaboration between AbleDocs and Seneca is to develop an app, which can transform product packaging text into accessible documents. Professor Tanvir Alam from Seneca's School of Software Design and Data Science (SDDS) will co-lead the project with Professor Monica Fontana from Seneca's School of Creative Arts & Animation (SCAA). The proposed Shopping Buddy app will work as a retail ecosystem bringing together content from manufacturers, distributors, retailers and consumer entities. This project is important to AbleDocs as its mission is to give visual access to all marginalized individuals throughout the world. The project will also provide an excellent experiential learning opportunity for the RAs; they will develop a fundamental understanding of technology requirements for accessibility and inclusivity in design, visual and user-experience. The resulting app and partnerships, which will follow the development of the initial prototype, enabling a world-wide virtuous cycle of inclusion within the retail environment.