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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."
Doesn't Android include something equivalent to iOS's VoiceOver
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Helping blind people, it should be dubbed Geordi!
Hi. I'm a computer scientist who spent a few months volunteering in rural Africa. You know what I saw? Cell phones everywhere. Those starving kids can barely feed themselves, but they have a cell phone. You see, the cell phone connects them to their father who moved to the city to earn enough to feed them, and with the cell phone, they pay about 10 cents a week to periodically call him and say what they need. Then he goes to market, buys a sack of rice, some spices, and whatever else they can afford, and makes the day-long trek back to the village to feed his family. In previous decades, the communication wouldn't be possible, so the family would gamble on how long they could stretch food until the father was scheduled to return, If they guessed too long, they run out of food, and have to go hungry (or pay higher local prices) until the father came back. If they guessed too short, the father makes extra trips (which cost about a full day's wage).
Granted, the starving families didn't often have smartphones, but they did have old Nokia models and cheap Chinese phones. Smartphones weren't even that big in America while I was there, so I'd expect to find a good number of them in Africa now. First-world technology doesn't just stay in the first world. Like everything other technology, it spreads across the globe, generally improving lives.
So now I ask, what are you doing about the problem of starving children in Africa? Trolling on Slashdot won't help them, nor will throwing insults at your fellow man. In fact, that haste to insult is exactly part of the problem: There is plenty of food in most areas of Africa, with massive surpluses in some regions. Due to tribal and religions politics, the trade is severely restricted. In some cases, children are trained from birth to hate people from other tribes, and that the other tribes don't deserve to have possessions. When these children grow up, they're the perpetrators of the genocides, crop burnings, and highway robberies that disrupt the distribution of food.
Let's lead by example. Support endeavors for their merits, and respect all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, age, or any other criteria. Let's just try to play nice, and help those we can, either directly or indirectly.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
They should look at integrating with blue tooth shoes too. Funny to see more than one story about smart phone technology for the visually impaired in the same day.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/07/footwear-blind?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/bluetoothshoes
The shoes have an actuator in the heel which can vibrate to signal when to turn or alert the presence of an obstacle, a sensor in the toe for detecting obstacles, and blue tooth for phone app integration.
I would like to see some sort of smartphone for the deaf and maybe the mute - that translates inbound speech into text, and perhaps can perform text to speech so these folks can use the smartphone to communicate.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That's a good start, and Android's tools for doing speech-to-text translation (not only for texting, but for most applications) are also a good start, but it's not the same as having a phone UI that's voice-centric, rather than a screen-centric UI which also has voice support.
Some friends of mine were working on that back during the boom (a few grad students, and a bad entrepreneur you and I know), but it didn't really take off. It's probably a lot more practical now that we're carrying computers with another decade of Moore's law speedup. Ideally, for blind people, you'd want a system that could be entirely driven from a bluetooth headset, only getting the phone out of your pocket if you need to take a picture of something and have it read it to you or whatever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
What local dictators should be overthrown, and who should replace them? A foreign leader won't be accepted by the locals, and a local will have the same millennia-long history of tribal politics swaying their decisions. Sure, you could go for that silly "democracy" thing, but who will run the elections? More locals who have been taught that the tribe is more important than the nation?
No, the first step is acceptance of each other, and more reliable distribution of resources. After that, the tribes can live together without competing, and from there peace can grow.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
True, but I didn't write the post for the mods. I wrote it because it pisses me off to see a troll talking about the starving kids in Africa that he's never seen and really doesn't care about. I wrote it mostly to blow off a bit of steam and partly to express what I saw firsthand.
However, the +1 mods do help to spread ideas. Currently my comment is the only +5 on this article, and that puts it on the RSS feed and in AlterSlash, too. Maybe, just maybe, someone will read it and decide to do something more meaningful to help, like volunteer for Peace Corps or even just be a friendlier person. Here's hoping.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That doesn't matter. Android has multiple systems for the blind, just like it has multiple systems for the sighted. It's a thriving ecosystem where the user gets to choose what fits their individual needs the best.
No they do not.
Not when it comes to something like voice assistance. That requires some thought from the developer, and some API assistance from the system.
Using VoiceOver a user can easily expire a touch interface while blind and make sense of how to use the system. With a very tiny amount of work you can make the titles for any UI elements extremely clear, although the default of reading things like label text and button contents works pretty well as-is.
You cannot simply throw a hodgepodge of applications at someone who is blind and say because the system is open it will all work out. It simply will not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Would you deny a meal to a starving person standing in front of you because it will contribute to other problems? How is it different if you deny it from a distance?
Okay so some aid is misdirected/misused/etc -- but that's no reason to throw your hands in the air, say the problem is too hard, and ignore it completely.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I'm surprised some ambulance chasing troll hasn't tried to sue all phone manufacturers under the ADA bill. Heck, they'll sue at the drop of a hat for less.