Alibaba made a smart screen to help blind people shop and it costs next to nothing

Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who's been blind since birth. When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. "Though it was expensive," Li, a 23-year-old who grew up in a rural village in eastern China's Zhejiang province, told me. Cheaper smartphone options in China often don't have good accessibility features.