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

Say What?

[jcr]

Doesn't Android include something equivalent to iOS's VoiceOver

-jcr

Geordi

[Anonymous Coward]

Helping blind people, it should be dubbed Geordi!

Re:Here's an Idea

[Sarten-X]

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.

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.