As many of you know, Sendero has long coined the term, "The Final
Frustrating Fifty Feet." To refer to the fact that we get you to the
building but not necessarily to the door. We had fun with something we
called the Blind Army 7 years ago when we annotated landmarks in the San
Francisco BART corridor to assist in finding bus and BART stops in that
final fifty feet due to GPS inaccuracy. Clearly, providing environmental
information was one of the current ways to help identify specific locations.
We worked with TriMet in Portland Oregon over 10 years ago on the same sort
of thing. They collected over 30 features of each of their bus stops.
Sendero pulled out the most relevant features to help locate bus stops from
that data like the bus bench is on the outside of the sidewalk or the
shelter is on the farside Northeast corner.
Interesting to see that a Perkins grant used this same approach in the app
described below in the media. I believe this was from a Google grant that
Sendero also applied for.
Mike
Imagine being lost and unable to find the nearest bus stop.
Now imagine looking for that same bus stop as a person who is blind.
"If there are no sighted people available to guide you," said Luiza Aguiar,
executive director of Perkins Solution. "You are out of luck."
Someone with blindness typically relies on a smartphone's voiceover and GPS
functions to help them get around, but there's a big catch: Devices with GPS
usually get people within 30 feet of their final destination.
"But that last 30 feet, when you are blind, is the last 30 feet of
frustration, because you can't get to your precise goal," Aguiar said.
Crowdsourcing the solution
To address the problem, Perkins Solutions, a division of the Boston-based
Perkins School for the Blind, has built a technological solution, the
BlindWays app, which Aguiar recently showed off at the New York Times'
"Cities for Tomorrow" conference. The iPhone app is assisting the blind and
visually impaired in Boston, guiding them to the nearest bus stop.
Crucial to the app's usefulness is help from the sighted. They are invited
to also download the app and become contributors, reporting landmarks near a
transit stop - a fire hydrant, a bench, a tree.
The landmarks offer tactile clues for the blind user. For example, they can
include specific descriptions such as "thick metal pole" or "thin square
pole."
Through the public crowdsourcing, contributors have provided these sorts of
clues for 5,200 of Boston's 7,800 bus stops.
Expanding to other cities
The app's creators want to replicate their efforts in other cities with Los
Angeles and San Francisco governments having expressed interest, Aguiar
said.
The app gives back a degree of independence and autonomy to blind users.
"Not having to rely on, you know, more segregated types of transportation,
that's really what visually impaired people want," Aguiar said.
BlindWays' crowdsourcing model is one that Aguiar believes will be part of a
larger trend in technologies that help the blind and visually impaired,
especially since almost everyone has a smartphone these days.
"We're all getting more and more used to living in a mobile world and
therefore, we could contribute anywhere and anytime to help a colleague or
somebody in our community," Aguiar said. "It's a powerful model for us, I
think we're going to see more."
Michael May,
President and CEO,
Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc.
http://www.SeattleLH.org/ ;
Founder and Chairman of Sendero,
http://www.senderogroup.com
Office: (206)-436-2110
Cell: (530)-304-0007
