Penelope is gradually losing her sight, so her daily life is full of challenges that she has to face. Penelope’s character is digital and behind her is a group of young people with and without disabilities , who use artificial intelligence to raise awareness about blindness.
Penelope (@penelope.pop_) was created by the Pop2See team , with the aim of familiarizing the public with blindness, explaining basic things about the lives of people with visual impairments, and raising awareness about accessibility.
“We created Penelope’s digital character in such a way that the blindness is not visible, because one of the messages we want to convey is that disability is not always visible,” Aliki Ragou , co-founder of the group, explains to ΑΠΕ-ΜΕΑ. As she adds, “even though she is a digital persona, Penelope is a mix of the girls in the group talking about things that we would all upload to our profiles.”
“Disability is not incompetence and this is a message that Penelope conveys, based on which all the posts of her story have been structured. We are trying through this AI influencer to break the stereotypes around disability” , emphasizes the philologist, copywriter and member of the team, Juliana Busi . Collaborator of the urban non-profit company “With Other Eyes” in accessibility training and blind herself, Juliana is a member of Pop2See and collaborates with the project manager, Gilda Mazaraki , in order to write the stories that are uploaded to Instagram with the help of her own lived experience. “It is very important that things are done for disabled people with disabled people themselves and I consider this to be the great value of our team”, adds Ms. Busi.
“Through Penelope we want to change how we see disability, in a more direct and modern way, and to create a more inclusive society together,” points out Gilda Mazaraki.
Penelope was preceded by a pilot project by the team a year ago in collaboration with blind Instagram and TikTok influencer Anna Balan, in which they presented a series of TikTok videos on topics related to blindness. The success of the project led them to decide to continue the effort to raise awareness among the public.
Application for the blind
Penelope is not the only activity of the Pop2See team. They recently developed their eponymous app, which is available for free on Android and iOS mobile devices. The aim of the application is to facilitate the daily lives of people with vision loss. The team trains the artificial intelligence system to recognize information on product and drug packaging and at the same time collaborates with companies to provide them with specialized information about these products. They also provide blind users with navigation through the application to places such as universities (there is already a collaboration with the University of Peloponnese), shopping malls and supermarkets.
The startup company began as a robotics team in 2021 by Aliki Ragou and Konstantinos Mazarakis , then high school students in Patras, and computer engineer and entrepreneur, Spyros Tsoukalas, all three co-founders of the company. “When my glasses broke and I was struggling at school without them, I realized the difficulties that people with vision problems have and we decided with the team to work with students who have vision loss and have an even more difficult everyday life,” Aliki describes to APE-MPE. A year later, the team won the silver medal at the World Robotics Olympiad (WRO) in Germany with a device for blind students that “translated” information it detected into Braille. The evolution of artificial intelligence led the team members, now mostly students, to decide to continue the idea by replacing the hardware with an application to support people with vision loss.
Juliana Busi remembers how an earache during a Pop2See team trip to Portugal to participate in a student social entrepreneurship competition led her to a hospital in Lisbon, where she had difficulty finding the emergency room. “It’s very difficult in places I’ve never been before that there is no accessibility for blind people. The difficulty starts from how I’m going to get there to what this place actually has inside when I get there. And I’ll have to find 500 people to ask and they won’t answer me or answer me well-intentioned but wrong or ultimately why should I be obliged to have to rely on someone and not be autonomous. Universally accessible places are few and far between and when you think there is an accessible place, it’s not like that, you’ve just been there 100 times and you’ve learned it by heart”, he explains.
Juliana’s experience was one of the team’s sources of inspiration for today’s application and as she herself says , “my difficulties begin from the moment I close the door of my house, from the moment I go out into the street. And I have certainly asked for things about the application based on this and we have set goals to implement some things on it.”
All the actions of the Pop2See group are directed at the level of counseling by focus groups of disabled people coordinated by the NGO “With Different Eyes”. The founder of the NGO, lawyer Vangelis Avgoulas, is also a mentor of the business.
“We collaborate with the blind community and record their needs and for each of them, depending on how easy or difficult it is technologically, we create pilot solutions. Summarizing their most important problems, we found that these are the lack of access to information, with the lack of transcription of medication information into Braille as a significant priority, the difficulty of navigating spaces, and at the same time the lack of awareness by sighted people of the existence of blindness and the accessibility problems they have,” emphasizes Spyros Tsoukalas from the Pop2See team.
Source: APE-MPA | Journalist: Maria Kouzinopoulou
* The photo of Penelope, created with artificial intelligence, was provided to APE-MPA for use by the Pop2Se team
