Lucky

A family member lost their vision. Watching them use a screen reader, I saw how much was locked away: screen readers read everything in order in the same flat voice, page numbers and figure labels included. Untagged or scanned PDFs often don't read at all.

At Setu Labs, I set out to build the tool I wanted them to have.

I lead product development and manage a team of graduate students.

With Lucky, you hold Space and talk. It reads PDFs in the right order with page-by-page navigation, handles Gmail by voice, and searches the web with cited sources. You can change its voice and speed just by asking.

The web app connects over LiveKit to a Python voice agent. PDFs go through an AWS backend of about 25 Lambdas, which recovers reading order and writes summaries. The agent never holds the user's login token: the browser makes every authenticated call.

I presented Lucky to about 300 blind users at a Foundation Fighting Blindness chapter meeting and recruited testers. Voice and speed came up, so now you can change both just by asking.

We co-develop Lucky with FFB chapters, and I exhibited it at VISIONS 2026. We'd priced Lucky at $20 a month, like most software, but visitors asked about cost: many blind users live on fixed incomes and rely on state agencies to buy their tools.

Take Lucky from booth demos to daily use, starting with the FFB chapters that already test it, and work out grants and state programs to reach people who can't pay $20 a month.