WORDS TO LIVE BY : Talking Signs, Maps, Scanners Help Blind Find Their Way Around
Chirping sounds coming from traffic signals are now a common sound in many cities around the world, a modest effort to help blind or visually impaired pedestrians safely navigate the streets.
But a flurry of recent innovations that creatively combine personal computers, satellite navigation, infrared communications and other technologies are enabling the blind to find their way around as if reading a map and to perform other tasks that had once seemed impossible.
“The PC is like a Swiss Army knife for the blind,” says Jim Fruchterman, president of Arkenstone, a nonprofit corporation in Sunnyvale, Calif., that makes high-tech devices for the visually impaired. “It’s a powerful tool that helps them to hurdle the barriers created by their disability.”
Talking Signs, developed at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, are among the most dramatic breakthroughs. The signs, located at street corners, contain a series vice messages stored on computer chips and infrared light transmitters to carry the information. When a blind person points a special $250 receiver in the general direction of a Talking Sign, the sign’s message is decoded into speech.
In San Francisco, where 14 prototype Talking Signs have been installed at downtown intersections, a blind pedestrian can access two messages: The first, a fixed message lasting about 30 seconds, identifies the exact location of the intersection, and the second, updated every five seconds, indicates the changing status of the traffic signal. (Because red, yellow and green traffic lights operate at different voltages the transmitter electronically senses changes and alters its message accordingly.)
The Talking Sign technology is not limited to the streets: About 95 signs are also being tested in San Francisco subway stations, where blind people are directed to fare gates, boarding areas and exits. And the private sector, namely retailers, might find them useful too.
“One of the things we discovered testing Talking Signs is that blind people don’t have any awareness of what is in the environment that surrounds them,” says William Crandall, a scientist in Smith-Kettlewell’s Rehabilitation Engineering Center. “Thanks to Talking Signs, blind people, like sighted people, would know what stores were out there and what things are available in those stores. Private businesses could use Talking Signs to reach a segment of the market to which they currently cannot cater.”
It’s not a small market: In the United States, about 1.1 million people are considered legally blind, and Crandall estimates that more than 9 million have-visual impairments that prevent them from reading street signs.
Arkenstone has developed two even more elaborate technologies for helping the blind get around: Atlas Speaks and Strider. Atlas Speaks is talking-map software that enables users to learn the physical layout of a neighborhood, city or state in far more detail than traditional Braille maps. It requires a 386 or better PC and a speech synthesizer or Braille display; the software, with one CD-ROM region or one floppy-disk area map, costs about $500.
Strider, which will be available later this year for $1,500 to $2,500, utilizes the Atlas Speaks maps in combination with the Global Positioning System--technology initially developed by the military to enable troops on the ground to locate their exact position by reading a series satellite signals-to create a portable talking map.
With a laptop computer stowed in a a backpack, a portable speech synthesizer, a GPS receiver, an earphone and a keypad, a blind person can walk along a street and get a live narration identifying streets and intersections. Strider users won’t have to ask bystanders which direction they’re facing, a welcome measure of in- dependence for many blind people.
Strider can’t substitute for a cane or a dog, says Mickey Quenzar, a blind technical support specialist at Arkenstone, since it can’t identify dangers such as open manholes. But it still gives a lot of location information that’s important to blind people.
Another promising product is the HandiScan, a hand-held scanner that translates super-market bar codes into speech. Blind people can use the device to tell whether the can of food they’re holding is full of peaches or dog food, for example.
Christina Baer, a schoolgirl in Mountain View, Calif., came up with the idea for HandiScan two years ago when her teacher challenged students to invent something that would help disabled people in their daily lives. The 12-year-old discussed the scanner ideas with her father, Tom Baer, a physicist at Biometric Imaging in Mountain View.
The elder Baer contacted Spectra Physics, a Eugene, Ore., 2 company that makes laser scanners. They liked the idea and sent him one of their scanners, and he then wrote the software for the product. The system, which should be available by the end of the year at a cost of between $1,500 and $1,700, works by matching a scanned item with a recorded description in the database.
Baer included an omnidirectional scanner, which searches for the bar code on a product, since people using the device don’t know where the code is located. At this point, HandiScan has been “road-tested” by blind people, who find that the device, like Strider and Talking Signs, offers an important share of independence previously unavailable to them.
Freelance writers Pontoniere and Purpura can be reached at pmpurpont@aol.com
