Let us introduce you to Penelope: a 20 -year -old student, Influencer on social media, who presents her daily life through her posts. Penelope gradually loses her eyesight, so this daily life is full of challenges she is called upon to face. The character of Penelope is digital and behind him is a group of young people with and without disabilities, who use artificial intelligence to raise awareness of blindness.

Penelope (@penelope.pop_) was created by the Pop2see team, with the aim of familiarizing the public with blindness, to explain basic things about the lives of people with visual disability and to raise awareness of accessibility.

According to the story presented, Penelope lives alone and is very active: she studies, exercises, dances, and as she loses her eyesight gradually at the end of the high school due to the black-haired retina she is suffering from, she tries to adapt to her new reality:

“We have made Penelope’s digital character in such a way that the blindness does not appear, because one of the messages we want to pass is that disability is not always visible,” Aliki Ragou, co-founder of the team, explains to RA-EIA. As she adds, “although it is a digital persona, Penelope is a mix of girls in the group by talking about things we would all upload to our profile.”

“Disability is not incompetence and this is a message that Penelope passes, on the basis of which all the posts of its history have been structured. We are trying through this AI influencer to break the stereotypes around the disability, “says the philologist, copywriter and member of the team, Giuliana Bousi. Associate of the Urban Non -Profit Company “With Other Eyes” in Accessibility and Blind Education, Juliana is a member of Pop2see and works with the manager project, Gilda Mazarakis, with the help of her own experience to write the stories on Instagram. “It is very important to do things for disabled people with disabled people themselves and I think it is the great value of our team,” adds Ms. Bousi.

“Through Penelope we want to change how we see disability, in a more direct and modern way, and to create a more inclusive society,” Gilda Mazaraki said.

A year before Penelope had preceded a pilot project of the team in collaboration with the blind Influencer on Instagram and Tiktok Anna Balan, featuring a series of videos on Tiktok for themes about blindness. The success of the venture led them to the decision to continue the public awareness.

Application for blind

Penelope is not the only activity of the Pop2see team. They have recently developed their peer -reviewed application, which is available free of charge on Android and iOS mobile phones. The purpose of the application is to facilitate the daily lives of people with vision loss. The team trains the artificial intelligence system to identify information on products and medicines and at the same time works with companies to provide them with specialized information about these products. Also, through the application they provide blind users in places, such as universities (already collaborating with the University of Peloponnese), shopping malls and supermarkets.

The startup company started as a robotics team in 2021 by Aliki Ragou and Konstantinos Mazarakis, high school students in Patras, and computer engineer and businessman, Spyros Tsoukalas, co -founders and three of the company. “When my glasses broke at some point and I had a hard time at school without them I found out the difficulties of people with visual impairments and we decided with the team to deal with students who have vision loss and have even more difficult daily life,” Alice describes in RES-EIA. A year later the team won the silver medal at the German Robotics (WRO) Olympiad (WRO) with a device for blind students who “translated” into Brailian information he was located. The evolution of artificial intelligence has led members of the group, most students in their majority, to the decision to continue the idea by replacing the hardware with a vision loss of people with a loss of vision.

Juliana Busi remembers how a pain in her ear on a Pop2see team to Portugal to participate in a student business competition, led her to a Lisbon hospital, where she had difficulty finding the urgency. “It is very difficult in places that I have never been to go before there is no accessibility for blind people. The difficulty starts from how I go to what this place finally has in the end when I get there. And I have to find 500 people to ask and not answer me or answer me well but wrong or finally why I am obliged to have to rely on someone and not be autonomous. The universal accessible spaces are few and when you think there is accessible space, it’s not like that, you’ve just gone 100 times and has learned it from the outside, ”he explains.

Juliana’s experience was one of the team’s inspiration for today’s implementation, and as she says, “My difficulties start from the time I close the door of my house, from the time I go out on the street. And I have certainly asked for things on this for the application and we have set goals to implement some things on it. “

All actions of the Pop2see Group are directed to the consulting level by Focus Groups of handicapped people coordinated by AMKE “with other eyes”. The company’s mentor is also the founder of AMKE, lawyer, Vangelis Avgoulas.

“We work with the blind community and record their needs and for each of them, depending on how easy or difficult it is technological, we create pilot solutions. In summary of their most important problems, we have found that these are the lack of access to information, with a significant priority being the lack of transcription of information of drugs into Braille writing, the difficulty of navigation in the areas, and at the same time the lack of awareness from the viewers of the existence of blindness,