Mildly Interesting @lemmy.world perishthethought @lemm.ee 5 mo. ago

Empowering the visually impaired with neat visual codes

I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc... neat!

https://navilens.com

EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we're discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.

19 comments

Let me guess, absolutely proprietary?

spits

There is something so fucking sinister about public infrastructure relying on closed source accessibility tools.
- You make a simple app and the company pays you small fee every time a scan results in a purchase. You also sell users' data because you obviously track all of that. Now companies selling accessibility products can target the customer with ads. Success!
  
  It's easier than applying for grants, and no one seems to mind this kind of economy. It's just a win/win. That is, it actually helps the visually impaired, and no one seems to care about being tracked or installing an app. "So what's the problem?" /s?
  
  It could have just been a QR code that links to a web page, but then who's going to pay for it? Back to begging for grant money. I work with a non-profit. Applying for grants is a full time job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  
  The vast, vast majority of open source projects are doing just fine without any grants.
Oh, I thought this was a joke.
- Yeah but no. I think, in a way, they're having your phone's camera assist you if you can't see well.
  
  Yeah, it looks like it's both more detailed navigation for sighted people, and geared towards helping people with difficulty seeing.
  
  Wish it didn't look like to be a proprietary code format, since that severely limits it's viability as a widespread thing.
- Seems like it should at least be embossed, have some sort of texture cue no??
I'm disappointed the London underground is using this proprietary thing, rather than QR codes, which have existed forever and are an open standard.
oh is that what these are? I saw something like this on a train station in Boston the other day, assumed it was some new kind of QR code or something
- Permanently Deleted
  
  QR codes are rarely contentful themselves, they are almost always just a URL pointing to the real content.
  
  It's done this way because URLs are smaller, and you can update the content without needing to go around replacing all the QR code stickers.
  
  In Madrid a lot of bus stops has these signs to help people to know when the bus will arrive by scanning it.
Thats cool & looks useful for alot of people. Type of app my grandma would use for fine print on products.

I hope the doomers didnt get you down too much. Open source is great, but options like this are still better than nothing :)
I looked them up after seeing them on trams in Melbourne.
Using AR features as assistive tech (navigation, visual inference, etc) for the blind and visually impaired was the focus of most of my publishing up until a few years ago. I expect you’ll see more of this type of stuff moving forward, including codes like this and hidden calibration markers for indoor spatial orientation and object interaction.
also, they place the WAI/WCAG banner but the webpage does not validate :PPP nice project tho, fuck the nerds

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