From the AFB Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, posted 9/1/15:
More and more accessible pedestrian signals (referred to as APS), which
provide audible and vibrotactile information to pedestrians with visual
impairments when the WALK signal is illuminated on a traffic light,
have been appearing in cities across the United States and the
developed world during the past decade. There were, for example, 99
intersections with such signals in New York City as of November 2014,
28 of which were equipped with APS in 2014 alone, according to the most
recent APS program status report issued by the New York City Department
of Transportation. For those signaled intersections that do not feature
APS, a new smartphone "app" (application) has been devised to provide
audible access to crossing lights in communities around the world.
SeeLight uses open-access application programming interface (API)
information—a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building
software applications—to obtain data on crossing lights in any city in
the world. This information is presented to users of the app as GPS
tags on an interactive map. SeeLight's developers hope to one day "map
every traffic light in the world."
The story of how SeeLight came to be developed leads back to Anna
Chapman, a former spy for the Russian Federation's external
intelligence agency, who pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy and
was deported from the United States in 2010. "I became less selfish
after I returned to Russia following my arrest and I had to do
something that was not just for me," said Ms. Chapman during an
interview promoting her nonprofit organization. She established The
Right to a Smile Foundation to help children who are visually impaired
in her hometown of Volgograd, previously known as Stalingrad, which is
located on the Volga River in southern Russia. With the help of the
All-Russia Association of the Blind, Ms. Chapman's foundation conducted
interviews with people with vision loss and discovered that street
crossings were a significant concern for this group in a country where
dog guides are scarce. One of the foundation's first projects was to
install APS in Volgograd. Ms. Chapman explained that Russia's
"nightmare bureaucracy" caused delays with the project: "It took us
over nine months of going from office to office to sort it all out. . .
. If I hadn't known the governor of Volgograd, we would never have been
able to do this. . . . We could only do eight sets of traffic lights in
the end. . . ."
SeeLight, which is available as a free download from the iTunes store,
provides spoken information in English or Russian on the distance
between an individual and the closest signalized intersection, whether
there is tactile pavement on the road to guide people with visual
impairments, and how many seconds remain until the light changes (from
green to red, for example). The app also has a "general mode" that is
designed to be used by individuals who are not visually impaired. For
more information, contact: Sergey Kovalev, executive director, The
Right to a Smile Foundation; phone: +8-929-786-00-55; e-mail:
bf-smile@xxxxxxxxx; website: http://seelight.hungryboys.ru.[Information
for this piece was taken from the September 3, 2015, PSFK article
entitled "SeeLight app helps the blind navigate city streets through
audible cues that instruct users on when to cross the road," by Lauren
Kirkwood; the March 16, 2012, Sputnik News article, "Anna Chapman's
right to a smile"; the May 2009 AccessWorld article, "Accessible
pedestrian signals: San Francisco sets an example," by Lainey Feingold
and Jessie Lorenz; and the Wikipedia entry, "Anna Chapman."]
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