[msb-alumni] The Blind Have High Hopes for Self-Driving Cars

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 23:34:53 -0400

BlankI worked with Jim Benham several times when I was helping sell assistive
technology eight years ago.

The Blind Have High Hopes for Self-Driving Cars

Advocates for the visually impaired are talking to companies and legislators
about developing vehicles they will be able to drive independently.

Article Link:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602555/the-blind-have-high-hopes-for-self-driving-cars/

During a few days in August, the parking lot at the Perkins School for the
Blind
morphed into a test zone where a golf-cart-like vehicle transported students
and staff members, guided by a laptop. It was a prototype from
Optimus Ride,
a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is developing self-driving
technologies for electric vehicles.

Though the trip was short and followed a programmed course, it generated
excitement at Perkins, the country’s oldest school for the blind, which serves
200 blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind students on its campus and
hundreds
more through programs in local schools. Advocates for the blind—at Perkins
and beyond—say driverless cars could revolutionize their lives, provided the
vehicles are designed to be accessible. As the promise of a truly autonomous
car draws closer, organizations representing the blind are taking a more active
role in shaping the vehicles and software being developed.

“Autonomous vehicles will be transformative for people who are blind,” says
Dave
Power, Perkins’s president and CEO. “For the first time, they will be
able to get to school, work, and community activities independently, regardless
of distance. There is tremendous enthusiasm about it, both here and nationally,
among the blind.”

Image: National Federation of the Blind president Mark Riccobono preparing to
drive the car developed by the organization’s Blind Driver Challenge in 2011.

Advocates want companies to make their autonomous vehicles disability friendly
rather than produce special cars for the visually impaired, which would
probably be extremely expensive. Power, a former technology executive, knows
the
blind community can’t assume that autonomous-vehicle makers will take
their needs into account. So he has begun inviting technology companies to
Perkins’s campus to make presentations and gather feedback. “We want to help
these vendors build accessibility into their designs and think about blind
people up front,” says Power.

Optimus Ride was the first company to respond to Power’s invitation. During its
visits, the startup test-drove its vehicle on Perkins’s 38-acre property.
It also held a brainstorming session to learn how driverless cars can best
serve
blind people and whether they could be deployed as shuttles on large campuses.

Perkins employees say they gave the startup numerous suggestions, such as
making
sure to provide adequate floor space for service dogs. They also emphasized
the need for a nonvisual interface that passengers could use to communicate
with
the car. For example, a touch-screen-controlled vehicle could accommodate
blind users by integrating voice-over technology or haptic feedback.

The setup could mimic the gesture-based screen readers that blind people use to
navigate their smartphones and apps. In fact, the Perkins group recommended
that Optimus Ride create an app for its future users. Jim Denham, Perkins’s
educational technology coordinator, says he anticipates using an app to do
everything from summoning a car to instructing it to make an unscheduled stop
and wait while he unloads his belongings. The app, in turn, could give users
periodic status updates about the vehicle’s progress and notify them when
they’ve
reached their destination.

Beyond vehicle and software design, the blind community wants to influence
regulations governing driverless cars. The National Federation of the Blind
(NFB),
the country’s largest organization for blind people, has championed the idea of
cars for the blind since the early 2000s, when it organized a
Blind Driver Challenge
to encourage universities to create nonvisual interfaces for cars. NFB
spokesperson Chris Danielsen says the group has since asked Google to
incorporate
accessibility features into its self-driving car. The NFB also plans to attend
an upcoming conference hosted by Daimler, at the invitation of the German
auto giant, and to submit comments on the automated-vehicle rules that the U.S.
Department of Transportation
released recently.

The American Council of the Blind (ACB), a national grassroots advocacy group,
has been tracking state laws to ensure that they don’t prohibit blind people
from using autonomous vehicles. When Nevada included restrictive language
related to blind people in its draft legislation, the organization asked
lawmakers
to make the wording less specific, according to ACB president Kim Charlson. “We
don’t think being blind should be a reason why we can’t take advantage
of these cars,” she adds. “On the contrary, we think it’s a reason we should
use
them.”

Charlson, like other advocates for the blind community, is looking forward to a
future of fully autonomous vehicles in which a blind person would not need
to do any type of driving and authorities would be alerted if the car got into
trouble. Blind people say that riding in semi-autonomous cars, alongside
sighted passengers able to serve as drivers, would not expand their current
transportation options. After all, they can already get lifts from friends
or family members, take taxis or Ubers, or use paratransit vans, which provide
shared door-to-door transportation to people with disabilities. “If we still
have to have another person in the vehicle, we’re no better off than now,
regardless of how sophisticated the technology is,” points out NFB’s Danielsen.

“Autonomous vehicles are going to be the future,” adds Charlson. “My objective
is to make sure people who are blind get to equally be part of that future.”

Steve
Lansing, MI

Follow-Ups:
- [msb-alumni] Re: The Blind Have High Hopes for Self-Driving Cars
  - From: Kalan J. Weingartz

[msb-alumni] The Blind Have High Hopes for Self-Driving Cars

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