🇺🇸 Akhil Nagori

What the glasses do

The Society for Science describes the project as inexpensive glasses combining STEM and coding that translate text to speech, addressing literacy access for visually impaired students and aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The function is simple to state and difficult to deliver cheaply: capture what is in front of the wearer, recognise the characters in it, and speak them aloud. Doing that on hardware a school can afford, rather than on a specialist device sold at medical-equipment prices, is the whole point of the design.

Why cost decides who benefits

Assistive technology has an access problem that mirrors the disability it addresses. The best reading devices for blind and partially sighted users exist, and they are expensive enough that in much of the world they are simply absent from classrooms.

A low-cost pair of glasses shifts the question from whether the technology exists to whether a school can buy thirty of them. The award citation ties the project explicitly to literacy access, which is the outcome being measured rather than the gadget itself.

Text-to-speech also has an advantage over the alternatives it competes with. Braille requires the material to be transcribed in advance, and a human reader requires a human; a device that converts whatever is put in front of it works on an unmodified textbook, a worksheet or a sign.

Two awards, one project

Nagori took the Broadcom Coding with Commitment Award, worth $10,000, at the ceremony in Washington, D.C. on 28 October 2025. He was also given the Thermo Fisher Scientific Leadership Award as the class speaker for the finalist group.

The glasses were a collaboration. Evann Sun, 14, also of Santa Clara, received the $10,000 Lemelson Foundation Award for Invention for work on the same text-to-speech translation glasses, which makes this one project honoured twice under different criteria.

The Coding with Commitment award is specifically for software written in the service of a community problem, which is the frame the project was judged in: not an exercise in programming, but code aimed at a documented gap in classroom access.

The competition

The Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge is the national middle-school science competition run by Society for Science. Thirty finalists were selected from nearly 2,000 applicants, representing 48 states along with American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico, and the programme reaches around 60,000 middle-school students.

The top prize in 2025, the $25,000 Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award, went to Miles Wu, 14, of New York City, who tested 54 variations of the Miura-ori origami fold for disaster relief shelters and produced designs able to support more than 9,000 times their own weight. Other $10,000 awards went to Peter Fernández Dulay of Jacksonville, Florida, for analysis of bias in AI image generation, and Camila Isabel Gonzalez-Thompson of Ponce, Puerto Rico, for work on dengue antibodies.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the two awards, the amount, his age, his home city, the nature of the glasses and their purpose, and the date and place of the ceremony.

Open: the components, the cost, the accuracy of the text recognition, any testing with visually impaired students, and whether the design has been released or distributed. Akhil Nagori is a minor; this page carries only what the organisers published about the project.