Peeking at the world of other senses.
Pogrebno podjetje Maribor was working with ARTOUR team on developments of mobile app. One of the core ideas during the project was how to improve possible guidance at cemeteries for those with low or no vision.
In order to understand the issue we have organized a meeting with blind person to get a sense of how that might work.
Completely blind people are a big challenge
Franc Donko, the representative of the society of people with blindness and low vision, accepted our call and we met at the cemetery. During a meeting we have discussed several aspects of how such people perceive the surroundings, what technologies may help and what are their actual needs.
As it turned out, completely blind people still lack proper technological solutions in orientation and guidance solutions. Devices that currently exist are not helpful for various reasons:
- precision is not good enough and may endanger them
- many things occur rapidly in today's world and changes are too quick for devices to understand and interpret them correctly (a bus may be standing 20m outside usual point due to construction work)
- devices are not ready for completely blind people (no buttons, just screens) or they are developed on very unsupported platforms
All these issues make completely blind people much poorly supported as to the lower vision people.
Chances for people with lower vision
On the other hand, people with lower vision can benefit a lot by simple technological solutions. They are already using mobile devices and certain adaptations can make an app very useful. We have discovered following possibilities within this:
- make the app ready for disabilities mode
- add audio guiding
- add audio recordings of the text
These features will be added to ARTOUR during the project to enhance the user experience.