We present a metaphor showing that blind people (users) often are living in a perplexing contexture – a chain of barriers affecting their ability to live independently. In such a context to support users’ tasks in real time, current technologies may not be intuitive enough to be used for this kind of real world application. The increasingly specialised devices and rapidly advanced assistive technologies require a composite architecture of scalable non-textual reading services. We illustrate this requirement by three user scenarios at a scale of a device, an object-awareness and a real-time situated meaningful response. (Ying Liu and Roger Wilson-Hinds)