S01:E18
Iza’s mum is sitting in the kitchen under the lamp. A magnifying glass, a second pair of glasses on over the first, a leaflet folded up like a concertina. After a moment she puts the paper down and says: right, I’ll take it the way I always have. This isn’t a story about her not understanding something. It’s a story about her physically not being able to see it. A barrier of eyesight, not a barrier of knowledge — and that’s a completely different problem, with completely different answers.
This episode is about four routes to the same content when the print is too small: a magnifier, the file from an official register, the phone’s built-in screen reading, and the pharmacist. We’re straight about each one, including where it runs out.
The most important caveat, right at the top: mojApteczka does NOT read the patient leaflet aloud. The leaflet it only opens, as a link to the official register. What it reads aloud is the Summary of Product Characteristics — a different, official document about the same medicine, written for doctors and pharmacists, not for the patient. That’s a harder text, and we don’t pretend that hearing it read out makes it any simpler. We say so plainly in the episode, because keeping quiet about it would be dishonest.
What we talk about:
What the app does NOT do: it doesn’t read the patient leaflet, it doesn’t summarise or simplify (it reads the official text word for word), it doesn’t advise, it won’t judge whether a medicine is right for you, and it won’t pick a dose. That’s what your GP and your pharmacist are for. We’re also open in the episode about what we haven’t tested: the whole path with a blind user.
Materials:
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About AI in this episode. The dialogue was written by Tomasz Szuster. The voices you hear are AI-generated synthetic voices — not recordings of the hosts. We say this straight out, because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way. Full details in the show notes and in the episode outro.
