Thirty-three-year-old visually impaired coordinator of Connect Africa, Ndapewa Teresius, says technology has tremendous potential to increase the independence of people with disabilities.

This comes after a group of young Namibians developed a mobile and web application called Connect-Africa to help solve some of the ICT challenges faced by visually and hearing-impaired people.

The application assists people with visual impairments to detect the denomination of banknotes, newspaper articles, programmes, medical labels, and bank statements by translating these into speech.

It can also translate English text into local vernaculars.

For the hearing impaired, the application translates spoken words into text and sign language, and vice versa, allowing the individuals to attend school, university, or any gathering without the aid of a sign language interpreter.

Teresius is optimistic that the application will improve their lives and enable them to perform better in their daily lives while helping them to improve their literacy level.

The application, which they have been working on since 2019, has already received approval from the Namibian Federation of the Visually Impaired and the Namibia National Association of the Deaf.

So far, the application has more than 10 subscribers.

One can simply download the app through the Play Store and click on the subscribe button, as well as share the app link for download.

The app is accessible to anyone in Africa.