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Disruptions: Visually Impaired Turn to Smartphones to See
Their World
Luis Perez loves taking photographs. He shoots mostly on an
iPhone, snapping gorgeous pictures of sunsets, vintage cars, old buildings and
cute puppies. But when he arrives at a photo shoot, people are often startled
when he pulls out a long white cane.
In addition to being a professional photographer, Mr. Perez
is almost blind.
“With the iPhone I am able to use the same technology as
everyone else, and having a product that doesn’t have a stigma that other
technologies do has been really important to me,” said Mr. Perez, who is also
an advocate for blind people and speaks regularly at conferences about the
benefits of technology for people who cannot see. “Now, even if you’re blind,
you can still take a photo.”
Smartphones and tablets, with their flat glass touch screens
and nary a texture anywhere, may not seem like the best technological
innovation for people who cannot see. But advocates for the blind say the
devices could be the biggest assistive aid to come along since Braille was
invented in the 1820s.
Counterintuitive? You bet. People with vision problems can
use a smartphone’s voice commands to read or write. They can determine
denominations of money using a camera app, figure out where they are using GPS
and compass applications, and, like Mr. Perez, take photos.
Google’s latest releases of its Android operating systems
have increased its assistive technologies, specifically with updates to
TalkBack, a Google-made application that adds spoken, audible and vibration
feedback to a smartphone. Windows phones also offer some voice commands, but
they are fewer than either Google’s or Apple’s.
Among Apple’s features are ones that help people with vision
problems take pictures. In assistive mode, for example, the phone can say how
many heads are in a picture and where they are in the frame, so someone who is
blind knows if the family photo she is about to take includes everyone.
All this has come as a delightful shock to most people with
vision problems.
“We were sort of conditioned to believe that you can’t use a
touch screen because you can’t see it,” said Dorrie Rush, the marketing
director of accessible technology at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit
vision education and rehabilitation center. “The belief was the tools for the
visually impaired must have a tactile screen, which, it turns out, is
completely untrue.”
Ms. Rush, who has a retinal disorder, said that before the
smartphone, people who were visually impaired could use a flip-phone to make
calls, but they could not read on the tiny two-inch screens. While the first
version of the iPhone allowed people who were losing their vision to enlarge
text, it wasn’t until 2009, when the company introduced accessibility features,
that the device became a benefit to blind people.
While some companies might have altruistic goals in building
products and services for people who have lost their sight, the number of
people who need these products is growing.
About 10 million people in the United States are blind or
partly blind, according to statistics from the American Foundation for the
Blind. And some estimates predict that over the next 30 years, as the vast baby
boomer generation ages, the number of adults with vision impairments could
double.
Apple’s assistive technologies also include VoiceOver, which
the company says is the world’s first “gesture-based screen reader” and lets
blind people interact with their devices using multitouch gestures on the
screen. For example, if you slide a finger around the phone’s surface, the
iPhone will read aloud the name of each application.
In a reading app, like one for a newspaper, swiping two
fingers down the screen will prompt the phone to read the text aloud. Taking
two fingers and holding them an inch apart, then turning them in a circle like
opening a padlock calls a slew of menus, including ones with the ability to
change VoiceOver’s rate of speech or language.
The iPhone also supports over 40 different Braille Bluetooth
keyboards.
On all the mobile platforms, people with vision loss say,
the real magic lies in the hundreds of apps that are designed specifically to
help people who are blind.
There are apps that can help people see colors, so pointing
their phones at an object will yield a detailed audio description of the color,
like “pale yellow green” or “fresh apricot.” People who are blind say these
apps open up an entirely new way of seeing the world. Light detection apps can
emit a sound that intensifies when someone approaches a light source. This can
be used to help people find a room’s exit, locate a window or turn off a light.
There are apps that read aloud e-mails, the weather, stock prices as well as
Twitter and Facebook feeds.
In the United States, one of the biggest challenges for
blind people is figuring out a bill’s denomination. While coins are different
sizes, there is no such differentiation between a $1 bill and a $100 bill. In
the past, people with impairments had someone who could see help them fold
notes differently to know which was which, or they carried an expensive
third-party device, but now apps that use the camera can identify the
denomination aloud.
“Before a smartphone was accessible we had to carry six
different things, and now all of those things are in one of those devices,” Ms.
Rush said. “A $150 money reader is now a $1.99 app.”
She added: “These devices are a game-changer. They have
created the era of inclusion.”
While some app makers have made great efforts to build
products that help people with impairments, other developers overlook the
importance of creating assistive components.
Mr. Perez said what he could do now with his smartphone was
inconceivable just a few years ago. But even well-known apps like Instagram,
which he uses to share some of his photos, do not mark all of their features.
“When some developers design their apps, they don’t label
all of their buttons and controls, so the screen reader just says, ‘This is a
button,’ but it doesn’t say what the button actually does,” Mr. Perez said.
“That’s an area where we need a lot of improvement.”
