Improving Digital Inclusion for Visually Impaired People Using AWS with Vision Ireland

Vision Ireland has been supporting blind and visually impaired people since 1931. The agency helps more than 60,000 people live independently through its services. Its clients access a suite of programs that provide practical support along with rehabilitation and pathways to education, employment, and full participation in community and public life. Vision Ireland has a subsidiary, Inclusion and Accessibility Labs, known as IA Labs, that focuses on using technology as a key area in the digital accessibility space.

Vision Ireland wanted to make more digital resources and technology available to its clients. In September 2020, the organization received a grant from the philanthropic organization Rethink Ireland, which it used to fund the creation of an Alexa skill. Skills are Alexa-specific apps with which customers can use their voices to perform tasks, enjoy media, or play games. “Smart tech devices such as Alexa are powerful tools for people with disabilities,” says Kyran O’Mahoney, chief technology officer at Vision Ireland. “There is a low barrier to entry because using Alexa doesn’t require a lot of technological skill, it’s affordable, and it’s widely available.”

Vision Ireland looked for a collaborator to help create a new Alexa skill and chose Cation Consulting, an AWS Partner that had expertise in voice technologies. Vision Ireland chose to use AWS because of its scalability. “AWS costs are more competitive, and the services that AWS makes available are incredibly robust. The decision was really a no-brainer,” says O’Mahoney.

The Cation and Vision Ireland teams began developing the Alexa skill in June 2021, and the myNCBI Smart Hub was officially launched on Global Awareness Day in May 2022. As a fundamental part of the development, Cation used the Alexa Skills Kit, a software development framework for users to develop content that uses built-in voice interaction models. This service gave the team a common programming language to deliver a feature-rich product.

Vision Ireland handles its users’ personal information, so app security is important. Cation built its system using AWS Control Tower, which orchestrates multiple AWS services. Cation also uses Amazon GuardDuty—a threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity—and AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service. The architecture also takes advantage of encryption features within other AWS services. “Because we can use these low-cost, highly efficient, out-of-the-box security attributes for various AWS services, we can provide a level of certainty and protection that would otherwise be costly and time-consuming to manage,” says Alan Kiernan, chief technology officer at Cation Consulting.

Vision Ireland and Cation worked together to simplify the management of user credentials using Amazon Cognito, which provides user sign-up and sign-in features and controls access to web and mobile applications. Before migrating to Amazon Cognito, Vision Ireland clients had to create multiple accounts to interface with the organization. For example, logging on to access audio resources took a different account than logging on to donate or to access training. Using Amazon Cognito, Vision Ireland's resources are modularized and integrated into one central system, so users can access everything the organization offers using a single account.

Vision Ireland and Cation developed a large set of features for the initial launch to provide Vision Ireland users with a robust product capable of high-quality interactions. People can use the myNCBI Smart Hub to access audio resources, such as recordings of magazine articles and newspapers, or to get information about their sight loss diagnosis. Since implementing the simplified and fully integrated user interface powered by AWS Cognito, Vision Ireland has seen a 300 percent increase in donations to the organization, thanks to the improved end-user experience generating higher engagement with the core business. Additionally, Vision Ireland now has greater visibility and more robust data on how users are engaging with the organization, and it can use this information to better serve its clients.

In addition to the Alexa skill, Cation and Vision Ireland also built an audio-content management application. Vision Ireland used to copy audio recordings of newspaper and magazine articles onto USB drives and mail them to people. Using the new application, Vision Ireland can simply and quickly deliver new content to the myNCBI Smart Hub and other channels. The application was built using serverless AWS services such as AWS Lambda—a serverless, event-driven compute service—and Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database. By using serverless solutions, Vision Ireland keeps costs low because it pays for only the infrastructure resources that it uses.

By working with Cation and using AWS to create its new voice-controlled Alexa skill, Vision Ireland can now provide a more robust catalog of audio content and resources to people with sight loss. Clients can use the myNCBI Smart Hub to get support and resources when they need them most. Vision Ireland can also better understand its users and their needs, and the app is seeing a consistent increase in users each month, as well as increased user retention. Vision Ireland is also planning to launch an iOS app and a web application to make resources available through as many channels as possible.

Vision Ireland is also making its technology available to other charities. Because of the architecture that Cation created and the low cost of AWS infrastructure, the application can be replicated at a fraction of its development cost. “We want to use these innovations to empower people with sight loss around the world,” says O’Mahoney.