OrCam, a company that makes products to aid accessibility for the visually impaired, has won a CES innovation award for its glasses-mounted MyEye Pro device. It aids the blind and visually impaired by reading out printed and digital text, recognizing people, identifying products, and more. OrCam took the prize in both the CES innovation accessibility and health and wellness categories. "We are living in uncertain times, yet... our users' challenges related to access have not stopped during the pandemic. If anything, they have intensified," said OrCam co-founder and co-chairman Prof. Amnon Shashua in OrCam's blog post.

Money is one of many challenges for people who are visually impaired. But Pedro Liz, who is blind from Retinitis pigmentosa, is able to accurately decipher different bills using the ORCAM MyEye--a device attached to glasses that works with artificial intelligence. Its features include recognizing different kinds of products which are then spoken into an earpiece. "Oreos cookies, it will tell me it's Oreos cookies this is how you recognize the product," said Pedro. Dr. Georgia Crozier with the Moore Eye Institute says MyEye is unlike other devices that work with magnification.

When he was in school, Michael Hingson created a Braille computer terminal so he could study like all the other students. Fresh out of college, he worked on the development of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind, the first commercial text-to-speech machine for the visually impaired. He's used white canes and guide dogs, voice controls on his smartphone and virtual assistants like Alexa, all in the name of doing things on his own despite being blind since birth. Until recently, that just seemed impossible. So when Hingson talks about the time he assembled a piece of furniture with Ikea-style pictorial directions, it's as if he's scaled a mountain.