Wayfindr has received £300,000 from the Big Lottery Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK. The Big Lottery Fund is responsible for giving out 40 per cent of the money raised by National Lottery players for good causes. Last year it awarded almost £713 million and supported almost 14,000 projects across the UK.

We will be using National Lottery funding to help transform and further develop our Open Standard by continuing trials in a range of environments (such as transport, shopping centres, and hospitals) across the UK. Our aim is to support the two million people in the UK who are living with sight loss to navigate indoor environments independently.

The funding will also support the development of a software accreditation program, meaning that in the future, venues with accessible audio navigation will be able to certify that their systems comply with the Wayfindr Open Standard, approved by the International Telecommunications Union as ITU-T Recommendation F.921.

Furthermore, the funding will aid in the development of an online training course on audio navigation and the Wayfindr Open Standard which will be aimed at accessibility and wayfinding professionals, helping to ensure that as more and more indoor audio navigation systems are deployed around the world, they are made accessible for blind and vision impaired people from the beginning.