Georgie: Smartphone For the Blind and Visually Impaired

hypnosec writes "A specially designed smartphone for the visually impaired or partially sighted has been launched in the UK. The device, dubbed Georgie, has many special features including a voice-assisted touch screen and apps that will allow for easy completion of day-to-day tasks like catching a bus, reading printed text and pinpointing a location. Designed by a blind couple, Roger and Margaret Wilson-Hinds, and named after Mrs Wilson-Hind's guide dog, the smartphone is powered by the Android operating system and uses handsets like Samsung XCover and Galaxy Ace 2, notes the BBC. The main reason for developing such a phone, according to the couple, was that they wanted to get the technology across to people with very little or no sight. 'It's exactly the type of digital experience we want to make easily available to people with little or no sight,' said Roger."

Comments

Re:Here's an Idea

[Sarten-X]

Those problems really depend on what organizations you're dealing with. I was volunteering with an organization that collected school supplies. I brought a whole suitcase of miscellaneous supplies, and it went right into the storage closet at the school I was teaching in. I brought some food, too, which I cooked up personally and brought to an end-of-term party for the students, supplementing their rice-and-peanuts lunch with a small bowl of macaroni and cheese.

The majority of "free stuff" problems come from charities that don't actually have people on the ground managing the whole project end-to-end. Some American charity will gather cans of food, ship them to some government contact, and that corrupt contact will just take the food and hand it out however he wants (according to the aforementioned tribal and familial prejudices), maybe being considerate enough to forge a nice letter from a local chief.

In contrast, one well-known organization whose volunteers I met was Peace Corps. Their volunteers are dropped alone into some of the worst-off villages, with some survival gear (water purifier, first aid supplies, and whatever region-specific resources they need), project plans (for projects like preparing farmland, building granaries, or digging wells) and access to liaisons for anything else they need. Typically, the village chiefs have worked for years to get a volunteer, so their work is almost always greatly appreciated by the locals, and especially the ones who look past the politics toward the future of the village. I was told a story about a female Peace Corps volunteer who was attacked, and the chief lined up everyone in the village for her to pick out the attacker.

That's the kind of organization that does the most good: where the entire process is under the supervision of people with nothing to gain, and the "handouts" don't start until the entire local society is heavily invested. Then there's enough riding on the project's success that the local tribal chiefs will be honestly supportive, and the villagers won't disappoint the chiefs. There's still no guarantee of absolute success, but at least the local politics will work in the project's favor.

Re:It DOES matter

[Anonymous Coward]

http://eyes-free.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/documentation/android_access/index.html

You mean like these ones? These are the default that are included with most / all vanilla Android installs (it was on my phone).

Or is it only one company can do this? Are you stupidly delusional? Or do the blind "expire" a touch interface?

Maybe the voice assistant can make them wait for 5-10 seconds while "i'm looking that up for you", while the Android user gets their info in less than a second? (see the many comparison videos on youtube, or the hundreds of newswriters that actually do a side-by-side comparison with Google Now instead of writing it off because "Android.")

So to conclude: You're partly right; can't throw a hodgepodge of applications at someone. If you use a consistent suite of applications, you're gold. There happens to be at least one on Android... but there's still customization you can use to tailor their experience. For example, if the sight impaired user use to be a HAM operator, it was required to learn morse code for their radio license. There's a morse code keyboard s/he can install, so they can use that instead of a bunch of blurry rectangles with black shapes in them.

Oops, I just one-upped you with the "hodge podge" of apps. Honestly, I didn't mean to.