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Smart Phones Give Disabled Users Help On The Go
Smart phones give disabled help on the go
Omar El Akkad Globe and Mail, Dec. 3, 2009
T.V. Raman is a researcher for Google Inc. He lives in Mountain View, Calif. Every day, he takes the company shuttle bus home. Every day, the shuttle driver drops him off at the same intersection. One day, a new driver dropped him off on the opposite side of the street. This made it difficult for Mr. Raman to get to his home, because he is blind.

The experience prompted Mr. Raman and his colleagues to work on a software application that uses a smart phone’s built-in capabilities to help users figure out where they are.”Now when you touch the phone, it tells you which way you’re pointing and where you are,” he says of the application for Google’s Android mobile operating system, which works audibly using global positioning system data. “The fact that you’re blind is your own business. The computer doesn’t need to know that.”

Since the dawn of the personal computer age, software developers have created specialized products for disabled users. But more often than not, that software was prohibitively expensive for many, and those who could afford it were tied to their desktops, unable to use programs while on the go.

But inventions like Mr. Raman’s illustrate how the smart phone revolution which has turned once simple phones into multipurpose devices equipped with information about your location, your social calendar, your favourite restaurant is changing the way we live. Now, for a few hundred dollars, users can buy the next generation of Web wired, GPS consulting wonder phones, many of which have more accessibility software built in than most computers had just a few years ago.

And as the newest smart phones spur a wave of specialized applications, they are also levelling the playing field. Disabled people are taking advantage of built-in accessibility functions to use the same applications everybody else does, while applications originally intended for disabled users are proving popular with smart-phone users in general.

“Making phones that are mainstream phones and are accessible with no expensive software is really a step forward that we’ve seen only in the last year or so,” said Everett Zufelt, national advocacy co-ordinator with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind in Toronto.

Google researcher T.V. Raman works on the Android Phone software with his colleagues on an application for disabled people that uses a smartphone’s built-in capabilities. It allows [people with visual disabilities] to use the same sort of applications that everybody else has access to.”

The iPhone, for example, includes a technology called VoiceOver, which talks to the user, telling him or her exactly what is on the touch-screen display.

The new version of Google’s Android operating system includes a similar capability, making phones much easier to use – not only for people with visual disabilities but also for those who have reading disabilities such as dyslexia.

“There’s huge potential and tremendous benefits,” said Stephane Doyon, a blind engineer at Google’s Montreal offices, who created in his spare time a talking news-feed reader for Android phones.

“A cellphone is relatively cheap compared to special-purpose software and computers.” The cost of developing applications for those phones is also relatively low, leading to a host of new software designed to make life easier for those with disabilities.

For example, a group of students and researchers at the University of Toronto is currently working on an iPhone application called TimbreMap. It is designed to give users audible information about their surroundings to help them differentiate between surfaces, such as park grounds or sidewalks. “As you touch the phone’s surface, different elements have different sounds,” explained Jing Su, one of the graduate students working on the project. “We try to give it a different texture and a different sound. Even though the phone’s glass surface is smooth, with the right kind of sound, you can trick the brain into giving you tactile feedback.”

TimbreMap’s designers also hope to give it functionality in indoor locations – where the phone can’t access GPS data which rely on direct access to satellites – by checking building blueprints. If successful, an application initially designed for users with visual disabilities may well become popular with any smart-phone user who simply wants to navigate a sprawling shopping mall.

When another group of U of T researchers began work on software that uses address book and geographic data to try to predict who a user is likely to meet at any given location, they intended it to be used by people with memory impairments. But the project soon drew interest from corporate executives and others with large, unwieldy address books, who saw the software as a streamlining aid. At the same time, disabled users are taking advantage of the accessibility aspects of smart phones to use the same software as everybody else.

Thanks to the audible screen reader on Mr. Zufelt’s mobile phone, the most commonly used application on his device is one that gives the CNIB executive access to the popular microblogging site Twitter.

“For the most part, people [with disabilities] want to have the same devices,” he said. “It’s cool, it’s mainstream – we don’t want something that’s designed differently.”