Hey everyone, I just wanted to tell you guys about the present I gave my father this Father's Day, I'm pretty proud of how well it's worked out so far.

My father is essentially fully blind due to Stargardt macular degeneration.

He, from what I understand, like many people who have the condition above, has lost his eyesight over a number of years, and is fiercely independent.

I have been searching for a cheap and accessible way to let him have tags around the house and on food objects and such things so he can easily tell what food item he's picking out of the pantry, or, ideally useful for things like what color the shirt is that he's going to wear. etc.

I've searched on the internet high and low. But the prices of accessible technology for this sort of device is either criminally expensive or just plain logistically hard to use. Either the device, or the process of making labels is tedious, or the cost of buying the specialized tags that work with the piece of tech, are expensive. And all-in-all none of the devices I found really solved the problem I was, at bare minimum, trying to solve. Which was finding a way for him to be able to know what the item he's about to eat is. It just didn't seem plausible to go grocery shopping and individually tag every single can, box and parcel.

I thought to myself, how can I solve this problem? And luckily it corresponded with Father's day perfectly.

Instead of messing with hundred dollar contraptions. I wrote a piece of (very rough code) to make a program that would take input from a standard, run of the mill, barcode scanner (like used at a grocery store) and run the UPC through a google search. The program then just takes the result of the UPC search and converts it directly to audio, so the name and product of an item is instantly known by a single scan.

So far, this has worked I would say 98% of the time for getting the name of food items. A google search of the UPC code almost always instantly brings up the product from some commercial website. In the rare chance it doesn't work and can't find the product name. The program adds the UPC code to a database, so it can be manually labeled and recalled later by my father.

Through the same database and a standard label maker, I also developed my own barcodes which can be printed out, to easily label other things. So far my custom barcodes have been useful more for things that aren't food. Such as labeling medicines with dosage information. Various cables. Cleaning chemicals. And clothing color by printing the barcodes on ink-friendly cloth and attaching it to the tag of shirts.

There are some limits to the system that I'm still working out. For example, the voice function which reads the description currently works through his laptop. I'd like to get a version that would work through his phone as well. But this is still a work in progress. Secondly, barcodes sometimes require a bit of searching with the scanning gun. This has been solved by adding tactile (clear) dots placed above / near barcodes on fixed items. On food items such as cans, usually a simple turn and twist will inevitably get the barcode scanned.

Besides that the only other drawback is that creating a custom barcode requires data entry into the database software. I'm also trying to work on an improvement to this as well, but while I use SQL-Lite, I think it could also be adapted to work with Microsoft-Excel as well. We haven't had any issues with mis-reading of the barcode, but in the case of this, it just would return nothing. So it'll be pretty immediate the scan wasn't successful.

So all in all, the system uses a $25 wireless scanning gun off of Amazon. On top of audible beeps, it also buzzes when a code is read which makes it great. It connects via wireless usb to any laptop, and works instantly. If being used without any software, it'll just enter the UPC/Barcode data directly into whatever text field is open on the laptop. This means the whole grocery-item look up via google search could be done manually with no form of database needed.

I also use a label-maker for custom barcodes, but this can be done with any printer and clear packing tape (in most applications.)

So. That's it! I just figured it might be interesting to post here. So far it's worked very well, he's had it for about a week now. (Early Father's Day Present) but I continually tweak the program. Perhaps this is already a common solution for people with low or no vision, but the tags are essentially free, the scanner is $25 as mentioned (roughly) and in the presence of no custom software, the JAWS on my father's laptop reads the data anyway. The closest products in comparison I could find, were in the hundreds of dollars.

Sorry for the long post :) Thanks for reading/listening!