Each Wednesday, and we are one day early for this week, we will be bringing
you an article of interest as it pertains to the topic of accessibility and
we hope you can use
it to become more familiar with this particular area.
This has become a rapidly growing and very important area and why?
Because the number of consumers in this market is growing and will continue
to do so for the forseeable future.
Governments, corporations, and individuals are paying more attention.
Please read on.
The Sterling Creations team
Follow us on Twitter @accessibleworld.
+++++++++++++++
Contributed by Dan Thompson
New free GPS
Autour (French for “Around”, pronounced “oh tour”) is
an eyes-free mobile system designed to give blind
users a better sense of their surroundings. Although
other systems (e.g., Humanware’s Trekker
http://www.humanware.com/en-
usa/products/blindness/talking_gps/
and standard GPS tools) emphasize navigation from one
specific location to another, typically accomplished by
explicit turn-by-turn instructions, our goal is to use
ambient audio to reveal the kind of information that
visual cues such as neon signs provide to sighted users.
Once users notice a point of interest, additional details
are available on demand.
When you start Autour for the first time, you’ll be
guided through an interactive tutorial that
demonstrates a few of the app’s modes of operation.
These include Radar, which announces places as the
radar sweeps past them in a circle around the user, and
Beam, which acts like a flashlight, announcing places in
the direction the user is facing. Other modes, and the
settings menu, are described in detail in the
instructions . Autour can be used hand-held, or largely
hands-free, by leaving the phone in a pouch around the
user’s neck, as desired. To ensure correct behaiour, it’s
important to specify the “carry mode” in the app’s
setting menu so that Autour knows which way the
phone is being held.
The Autour user experience is tightly tied to spatialized
audio, preferably using bone-conducting or open air
headphones so as not to interfere with the natural
sounds of the environment. Names of places appear to
come from locations surrounding the user, thereby
giving a sense of directionality and distance. This allows
for parsimony of representation and less intrusive sound
cues. Imagine the difference between a mechanical
voice stating, “Restaurant, 50 meters, 60 degrees to your
left” vs. a very short “Restaurant” spatialized in the
correct direction.
A short video is available for viewing here:
http://autour.mcgill.ca/en/
Autour app helps visually impaired individuals
learn what’s around them
We invite you to download the app at the next link and
try it out
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/autour/id887476373?
mt=8&l=en
Below are instructions for the app and the third and final
section covers technical information.
*II. Instructions
Autour is a cartographical application for the blind
that has been developed at the Shared Reality
Laboratory of McGill University.
It can run on the iPhone 4S and other more recent
iPhones, but it does not run on the iPad or the iPod
Touch.
Autour has several modes : the tilt of the device
allows you to choose between two of the modes, a
horizontal one and a vertical one. By default, the
vertical mode is Radar sweep mode, and the
horizontal mode is the Beam mode. On top of this,
you have the following modes : Shockwave,
Browse, Tutorial, Menu, and a mode that just waits
for GPS lock. In any horizontal and vertical mode,
you can tap the screen twice quickly to hear the
address where you are, the status of sensors, and
also a summary of places around you. While that is
spoken, you may interrupt by tapping the screen
once or by tilting the device.
Radar Mode
This is one of the two kinds of Sweep Modes.
Point the device up with the screen facing toward
you, then touch the screen. This will start an
automatic sweep. You will hear a ticking sound
indicating the progress of the scan around you
clockwise, along with the names of the places
around you. There are 48 ticks per turn, equally
spaced around you, but not equally spaced in time,
because saying the name of a place slows the
sweep down. To pause a sweep, touch the screen
again. Slide a finger from right to left to hear a
detailed version of the last place you have heard,
telling you its distance and direction. Slide again to
hear the previous place in the history, or from left to
right to hear the following place in the history. If you
go past the oldest spoken place in the history or
past the most recent, a tone will play instead. To
stop hearing about a place, touch the screen.
While the Sweep mode is doing nothing, you can
continue the sweep by touching the screen.
Beam Mode
Tip the phone so the screen is facing up. You can
activate and deactivate the beam in the same
manner as in Sweep modes, and you can go
through history in the same manner as in Sweep
modes too. When the beam is activated, the
history is erased then the places that are
approximately in the direction of the device are
enumerated in order of increasing distance. If you
turn the device sufficiently in a clockwise or
counterclockwise way, the history will be erased
again, the new direction of the device will be
chosen as the reference, and the places will be
enumerated in that approximate direction instead.
Standby Mode
When GPS does not work well, Autour chooses
this mode instead of any other horizontal and
vertical mode, until the GPS works again. The only
thing allowed in that mode is the double-tap.
Menus
To enter the Menu mode, slide a finger upwards,
then do as if you were in the Settings app, except
that to exit, use the Back button, not the Home
button. Instructions about settings are found directly
in the Settings menu or its sub-menus, in the same
way as in the Settings app. There, you will find
additional instructions appearing below each
control to which they refer. The About menu
contains various texts, such as this manual, as well
as the possibility of retrying the interactive tutorial.
Unlike the first time, the tutorial can now be
interrupted by pressing the main button then going
back into Autour. The Other menu contains means
of accessing applications Transit App, Google
Maps, Apple Plans, as well as of going see our
webpage and writing us email.
Shockwave Mode
In the Settings, go to the Sweep mode selector,
and select Shockwave. Then leave the menus and
tip the phone as you would in Radar mode. The
Shockwave mode is identical to the Radar mode,
except for the following aspects. Instead of sorting
by direction, this mode sorts by distance, therefore
the sweep is done as a circle that starts where you
are and grows until the maximum distance
specified in the settings, and at that moment, a
new sweep starts in the same manner.
Browse Mode
In Settings, go to Horizontal mode and select
Browse. Then leave the menus and tip the phone
as you would in Beam mode. To play the the place
closest to you, swipe a finger to the right. Swiping
to the right again will get you to the next place in
the list ordered by distance. Swiping to the left will
get you to the previous place in the list. A tone will
play whenever you try to go past the end of the list
or before the beginning.
Other notes
Please note that the place information from the
phone GPS and compass can be unreliable. Do
not rely on Autour for navigation or safety; it does
not replace a cane or guide dog. If the GPS signal
is poor, Autour will stop announcing places and
play a quiet wobble noise periodically while waiting
for a better location fix. If the compass accuracy
degrades, places will be spoken with north, south,
east or west directions rather than a position such
as front right. To recalibrate the compass, move
the phone in front of you in a figure eight pattern,
with the screen pointed up toward the sky. Autour
works poorly in areas where the sky is blocked by
tall buildings, which causes the GPS to provide
poor location information. This is difficult to fix, but
you can try holding the phone so it has the best
possible view of the sky.
If your area has good Foursquare™ data, we
strongly recommend setting Autour to use their
information, as it is often much more relevant than
that from Google Places. This is primarily because
it can be better ranked by checkins and reviews,
meaning you are more likely to hear about
locations that other people like. That said, Google
Places is more comprehensive.
Note that the information from the Google Places
or Foursquare™ databases can contain errors. If
you want them corrected, contact the responsible
company by the appropriate means.
Autour does not work in a moving vehicle, and will
simply stop playing locations. This is partly
because of server response time – our current
server cannot return results fast enough to keep up.
But it is also because the modes of Autour are not
designed in function of a fast-moving user. If you
would like to see a version of Autour that supports
car and bus use, please contact us so we can
gauge the interest in this feature.
Finally, keep in mind that Autour is a research
project and is not a commercially supported
application. You can email us at
autour@cim.mcgill.ca
Finally, keep in mind that Autour is a research
project and is not a commercially supported
application. You can email us at
autour@cim.mcgill.ca
with comments,
suggestions, and bugs. You may also ask to
participate in our research. Note that we are a
research team at McGill University, and are eager
to hear about problems you encounter and
suggestions for new features, as well as stories
about how Autour helped you.
The instructions page is here:
http://autour.mcgill.ca/en/instructions.html
*III. Techical Information
Autour currently runs on iPhone 4s or later; the
Android version is presently being prepared. The
app uses the smartphone’s built-in compass,
accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS hardware to
determine the user’s location and orientation.
Nearby places are retrieved automatically via the
Autour server. The appropriate sound scene is
then rendered using the
libpd
library to run
PureData
(Pd) patches.
The Autour server acts as an intermediary for real-
time requests to Google Places™ and
Foursquare™ to locate companies, public
buildings, monuments, etc. The Autour app can
then render these places in different ways, e.g., by
relative direction (“front right”) or by cardinal
direction (“northeast”). Category names (e.g.,
“bar,” “fast food”, etc.), are spatialized to sound
like they are coming from the actual location of the
POI, giving a direct cue as to its direction and
distance.
The server contains a copy of bus stops from 38
public transport companies of major
urban centres
across Canada
; it also contains certain portions of
OpenStreetMap
for all of Canada, as used to find
the nearest point on the closest street, to name
intersections, and obtain the contours of parks and
certain large buildings such as hospitals.
OpenStreetMap data is copyrighted by its owners,
who provide it under a free license (ODbL).
There is a Video demonstration at this link.
http://autour.mcgill.ca/en/
If using a screenreading software and visiting the
above link, press the letter b once. A play button is
highlighted. Press the spacebar to start the video.
User testing
We have worked with both French and English
organizations for the blind in Montreal, including
the
Institut Nazareth & Louis Braille
(INLB) and the
Montreal Association for the Blind
(MAB) to test
Autour with a number of blind participants. These
user tests have taken the form of informal
walkabouts while soliciting feedback, more formal
tests with specific tasks to complete using Autour
while on the streets of Montreal, and also longer-
term deployments where blind individuals were
loaned iPhone devices to use in their daily
routines. Feedback has been generally positive for
the system as a whole, but has also pointed out
numerous usability and other issues that have
been factored into the design. A paper (link below)
summarizing the results across several of these
tests was presented at the 2013 ACM Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).
Source:
Ron & Danvers
And the Autour – McGill University in Canada.
I am unclear if the app works in the U.s. I certainly
hope it eventually does if if not yet available.
