Born with a 95-percent visual disability in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Zülal Tannur’s condition was identified by her family when she was three months old. Her family moved to Istanbul to receive higher-quality healthcare. First, learning objects by flashcards, she began to educate herself and learned how to discern objects in real life when she saw them. Recalling how her family used computers to find large images, Zülal says that technology became integral in her life at an early age and that she’s been using computers since she was four and a half years old.

Zülal conducted countless projects during middle and high school, and she worked as a user experience specialist in WeWalk, a social initiative for the people with visual disabilities. She also worked in the integration process of SeeingAI, which is aimed towards the people with visual disabilities, in Turkey. She was chosen as the Women Leader Overcoming Barriers by Microsoft in 2020. Studying at Boğaziçi University’s Psychological Counselling and Guidance department, she founded a platform that provides AI- and human-generated descriptions for the people with visual disabilities. The From Your Eyes mobile application, launched in 2022, helps the people with visual disabilities by employing an artificial intelligence model to provide a caption for an image the user uploads to the app. If the user does not find the caption satisfactory, the app forwards it to a volunteer to provide a more detailed description. The description provided by the volunteers is used to improve the AI model to offer a better service in time.

The AI provides a description for the uploaded image in seven seconds. If the image is forwarded to a volunteer, it gets a response in two minutes in average. The goal is to reduce the volunteer response time by having the AI provide more accurate captions through training with more people with visual disabilities and volunteer descriptors. Amassing beta users from 27 different countries, From Your Eyes has so far provided 8,000 descriptions with nearly 2,000 users and descriptors.

Zülal Tannur continues to make a difference in the lives of people with visual disabilities thanks to From Your Eyes, a new approach that combines artificial intelligence and human interaction, born from Zülal’s dissatisfaction with description applications at the time.