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From: "Robert Acosta" <boacosta@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 12, 2016 at 4:28:04 PM EDT
To: aw-announcements@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: [aw-announcements] FW: [Ccb-l] FW: [leadership] Article: The Blind
Have High Hopes for Self-Driving Cars
Reply-To: aw-announcements@xxxxxxxxx
Robert Acosta, President
Helping Hands for the Blind
(818) 998-0044
www.helpinghands4theblind.org
From: Ccb-l [mailto:ccb-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jeff Thom
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 1:15 PM
To: ccb-l@xxxxxxxxxx; acbcapchap-l@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Ccb-l] FW: [leadership] Article: The Blind Have High Hopes for
Self-Driving Cars
From: Kelly Gasque via leadership [mailto:leadership@xxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 11:15 AM
To: leadership@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [leadership] Article: The Blind Have High Hopes for Self-Driving Cars
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.”
<image001.jpg><image001.jpg>
_._,_._,_
Accessible World Team
http://accessibleworld.org
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