I honestly find Envision’s announcement very difficult to read.
Envision, one of the companies that has spent years building AI-powered
tools for blind and visually impaired people, has announced that it may
stop actively developing its products by the end of 2026 if it cannot find
a partner willing to take the company and its products forward.
According to a long message from Envision co-founder Karthik Mahadevan,
the company has reached a point where it believes it has taken Envision
as far as it can with its current team and business model.
And honestly, I think this is much bigger than just one company shutting down.
Envision started in 2017 with Karthik Mahadevan and Karthik Kannan, with
the goal of using emerging technologies to build practical tools for blind
and visually impaired people.
Over the years, Envision built the Envision AI app, which reached nearly
one million people worldwide. In 2020, the company introduced its
AI-powered glasses for blind people and later worked with major companies
such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
That is an impressive achievement.
But the announcement also highlights something that I think the
accessibility community needs to talk about much more openly:
building great accessibility technology is not necessarily enough to
create a sustainable business.
Envision initially had a free version of its app and a Pro subscription.
At its peak, it had around 15,000 paying subscribers.
However, acquiring new paying users became increasingly expensive.
When Envision launched its glasses, the company moved toward making the
app free and relying mainly on hardware sales. That worked for several
years, but hardware is generally a one-time purchase. It does not create
the kind of recurring revenue that a software subscription can provide.
The company eventually started preparing for a future where the software
could work across different smart glasses instead of being tied to
Envision’s own hardware.
That led to Ally, a Freemium product designed to work with commercially
available smart glasses.
But then Envision faced another major problem: the size of the paying
accessibility market.
The company says that the first 100,000 users are relatively easy to
reach, but acquiring additional users becomes increasingly difficult.
Around one million users, growth starts becoming extremely difficult.
On paper, there are hundreds of millions of blind and visually impaired
people around the world.
But the reality is much more complicated.
Many people with visual impairments are dealing with problems that
technology alone cannot solve: poverty, unemployment, lack of basic
services, and limited access to technology.
That means that having hundreds of millions of potential users does not
automatically mean having hundreds of millions of customers.
And I think this is one of the most important points in the entire
announcement.
Accessibility is a huge human need, but it is not necessarily a huge
commercial market.
Envision also experimented with moving from B2C to B2B.
There were successes. Companies such as Unilever purchased Envision
products, and museums started paid pilot projects.
But B2B accessibility can also be difficult to scale because companies
want large numbers of users and need to see a clear return on investment.
Envision also tried expanding beyond blind and visually impaired people
and targeting older adults.
That showed some promise, but serving a completely different audience
often means building a different product. Trying to serve both audiences
at the same time can make it harder to build the best possible experience
for either one.
After years of trying different approaches, Envision reached the
conclusion that it needs someone else to take the company in a new
direction.
The company says it is currently talking with potential partners and is
open to anyone who believes they can continue the Envision story.
But if no partner is found by the end of 2026, active development is
expected to stop on December 31, 2026.
After that, online-dependent features would gradually stop working.
Envision says users will be informed before individual features are
discontinued.
The company also plans to release a final update that will move as many
features as possible to offline functionality.
That is one part of the announcement I really appreciate.
The company says the final version will remain free, and offline features
will continue working even after active development and support end.
For users with active subscriptions, Envision says subscriptions will be
cancelled before online features start being discontinued, so people will
not continue paying for services that no longer work.
Personally, I think that is the right way to handle such a situation.
But beyond the business details, what really stayed with me is what this
means for the accessibility community.
I have followed the development of accessibility technology for years,
and I believe companies like Envision have played an important role in
showing what is possible when technology is designed specifically around
the needs of blind people.
we also working on a software project aimed at helping blind people
navigate and move around more independently. It is still under
development and far from finished, but working on it has made me think
even more about how difficult it is to turn a useful accessibility idea
into something that can genuinely reach and help people at scale.
So I don’t see Envision’s situation as proof that accessibility
technology doesn’t work.
I see it as proof that the business model around accessibility is still
extremely difficult.
And I hope developers, entrepreneurs, investors, and larger technology
companies learn from this rather than simply seeing it as a failure.
Envision managed to reach nearly one million people.
That alone proves that there is a real demand for this kind of technology.
Maybe the next company will find a better business model.
Maybe the answer is not building a single accessibility product, but
making mainstream technology accessible from the beginning.
And honestly, I think that second possibility may be the most important one.
One of the biggest changes in accessibility in recent years has been the
rapid growth of AI itself.
AI is increasingly being integrated into websites, smartphones,
computers, and especially smart glasses.
If mainstream products become genuinely accessible by default, the impact
could eventually be much greater than what any single accessibility
company could achieve.
But that will only happen if companies actually listen to disabled users
and make accessibility a fundamental part of their products rather than
an optional feature.
So while I am disappointed by Envision’s announcement, I don’t think this
should be the end of the story.
I hope someone takes the opportunity to continue building on what Envision
created.
And I hope the accessibility community doesn’t see this as a reason to
stop building.
If anything, I think it should be a challenge:
How do we build accessibility products that can reach millions of
people, remain affordable, and still become sustainable businesses?
That is the real question.
And perhaps Envision’s biggest contribution will not simply be the
products it built, but the lessons it leaves behind for everyone trying
to build the next generation of accessibility technology.
Whatever happens next, I hope Envision’s work continues in some form.
And I hope the next chapter is not about accessibility technology
disappearing, but about it becoming so deeply integrated into mainstream
technology that people eventually stop thinking of accessibility as a
separate category at all.
That, in my opinion, would be the best possible outcome.