Hi *|FNAME|*,
I read something really amazing, Meta is donating 130000 meta glasses to blinded veterans. I wrote about it here.
In a nutshell, in a short amount of time, it will be one of the most popular devices to read text and get information about the environment. The more people use it, the more information will be available about it.
What I didn’t discuss in the post, and only sharing with you is what this really means.
First, you might ask: it doesn’t do much more than what you can already do with a phone, if you have the glasses you already have the phone, too. This is true, but a blind person never has enough hands. During travel, one hand is usually occupied with a cane or a dog. Then if you hold the phone in the other, you just lost the two things that you used to “see”. Of course, both the cane and the phone is there to compensate for vision, but where will you put your shopping bag and what will you do when you quickly need to respond to an unexpected event? This is why hands-free navigation is so important, having that one extra hand can make all the difference. Ok, this is a bit simplified, I wrote about this in greater detail on the blog.
When it comes to assistive technologies, there are two approaches. Mainstream, or specialized.
The mainstream means that a device is out there for all, and it is made accessible so people with disabilities can use it. Here we can also branch into two aspects, sometimes what was created is made accessible later. That’s the wrong, but sometimes the only available approach. The working approach is that a device made for all has accessibility built into it from the start.
But here is something to consider: something like the Meta glasses are not made for blind people. They can be made fully accessible, but it is not designed to be an accessibility tool.
Certain things, like tactile maps, braille books or book readers can be made to meet the needs of blind people. But the mainstream devices are there to serve all.
In this case, it always have to be taken into consideration that while the accessibility aspect is working, it is designed for all users.
Recently several glasses were made specifically for blind people, including hardware and software, but since it had a small market the price was unreasonable. But when they brought the prices down, some companies could not keep up because they couldn’t make enough sales.
So, unless is a product that is made for blind people specifically, there is always a chance that it will just be good enough, and updates will mostly target the mainstream audience.
Let me give you an example when something like that went wrong. Almost two decades ago, Apple made iOS accessible for blind people. We wouldn’t have thought that the touch screen will be the way, there was even a braille based phone on the market 20 years ago, but they couldn’t find a big enough market. But the touch screen worked out, and now most blind people use touch screen phones. But when it comes to testing, accessibility sometimes becomes the last thing to look at. It happened so that one of the iOS updates disabled the keyboard functionality when using it with a screen reader. There wasn’t much information about it out there in the media, it worked well for most people. But in my situation, while most people were happily typing away, I had an iPad that was part of my daily workflow which was turned into a brick until they fixed the issue.
Since then, large corporations put much more effort into accessibility, but we always have to wonder, will it work well for us the way we need it, or will it just be good enough?
I don’t want to say if mainstream or specialized devices are better, but it at least does make sense to at least look into it. Could it have been a better idea for Meta to spend the same amount of money to fund an organization which is specialized on making products for blind people? We will never know.
But the bottom line is, there is a great product, I’ve been testing it for a while, it may not have the best approach, but it will be able to significantly improve the life of blind travelers. And here understand travel widely. It is not just the overseas trip, but also includes going down to the corner to grab lunch.
I am very much looking forward to what they make of it, I’ll keep you posted.
And a completely different subject. Though it has nothing to do with travel, I would like to share it with you because many of my readers are teachers of the visually impaired who may be able to use it.
Over the last couple of years, we have been creating 3D printed tools for teachers of the visually impaired to teach biology/anatomy. We have models of the heart, liver, brain, kidney and the eye, and we are making more. It is in collaboration with the Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and they made the 3D files freely downloadable. If you don’t have a 3D printer, we can help you get it into your classroom. I wrote about it here.
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I hope you have a great summer:
Tom