¶ … W/Spaces)
Over several months in 2011, I developed a cheap MP3 system with a team of friends, enabling sight-impaired users to upload and listen to audio books. Initially, it was my involvement with the National Society for the Visually Impaired that was the impetus for the concept. I started by reading books to record them electronically and uploaded them onto CDs used by individuals in need of assistance. After the institute received numerous complaints about the difficulty of keeping track of and finding desired books from large collections, we first thought of Apple's "iPod shuffle" system from the perspective of capacity to store large numbers of books, portability, and the "VoiceOver" title-identification function. To keep the product affordable, we duplicated iPod components in an electrical factory in Ramallah, Palestine. Our finished product cost one-third of the price of the iPod Shuffle and allowed 10 times the storage capacity.
It was doubly meaningful achievement, because of the technical challenges and the tremendous value it added to the lives of users by allowing them to overcome their barriers to accessing, connecting, and participating in the world of their peers. However, my Palestinian community already endures limited access to electricity to support ordinary life needs, making computer-based reading programs comparatively useless. Intellectually, it presented a challenge to solve a problem, but it was the connection to my ongoing work in the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem, a non-profit organization dedicated to solving such problems, that really gave the project meaning in terms of its the general importance of developing renewable energy technology for my community that really made the project fulfilling in terms of social benefit. In principle, it provided an ideal opportunity to approach the problem from the other end, by reducing the need for energy to complement our efforts on the sustainable energy development front.
