Category: accessible Devices
Hi All, I'm applying for a grant to develop a Traffic-light-reading app for the iPhone, to make independent travel safer for blind people. You can learn more about how this app would work here: https://youtu.be/KXK0_WWtGmc Would you find such an app useful in your daily lives? I, as a not-very-confident cane-user, certainly would. Would service-dog users find this app useful, since the dog, though unable to read traffic-lights, is able to get you across the street safely, thus making the light's status irrelevant, as long as you got across the street safely. I know that most traffic-lights nowadays make noise, but not all do, and when audible lights break, sometimes only the sound-making components stop working, and the light continues to function. This app is not meant as a substitute for mobility aides, it's goal is to boost the confidence of blind travelers, and remove a little bit of the pressure of independent travel, by making street-crossings safer and more accessible. Thanks for any thoughts!
not belittling your idea, its a good one. but its rare I actually look at a traffic light. I just use the flow of traffic.
Except on those Sunday mornings when traffic's dead. Then such an app would actually increase safety.
I don't live in an area where traffic dies, ever.
I'm a cane user and would find this useful. While I wouldn't rely on it exclusively it would be a helpful aid especially when traffic is lite.
Yes, extremely useful. I have sometimes travel late at night and it is quiet.
I have to wait at a crossing a long time for traffic to come along.
Sometimes I just take a chance on it.
With cars that don't make noise anymore, this app would be good.
The apps reliability would have to be tested, but it is a grand idea.
agreed with Leo, I have lighted intersections I avoid because I need to cross during dead periods, and i"m a dog user. I think there are some misconceptions about a dog's looking out for safety though. While i feel it's potentially more safe, dogs also can get very distracted and freaked out in the moment, so I think it would potentially be helpful. Although it would need to be something very simple and straight forward so as not to detract someone from being able to still pay attention to traffice while using hte app and crossing.
one question I have is/, with intersections, they are not all the same. If you couldn't see at all to know where the light is, because lets place it they are sometimes not where you would expect them to be, how would theh app locate the light and keep track of it?
Thanks to everyone for the feedback. Liquid-Tension: I'm looking at a few approaches for finding the light pole, either a Bluetooth-beacon-based approach, (in which small devices would be mounted to traffic-light-poles to let the phone know where the pole is, or croud-sourcing, (having a team walk around a city, taking notes on where at an intersection the lights are located. I think croud-sourcing is easier, (as long as the people taking notes know what they're doing), since beacons can malfunction/their batteries can die, and using Bluetooth constantly on a smartphone would significantly drain the batttery, more than if you were just using Location Services/GPS. I just applied for the grant, and will keep you posted on any happenings with this app! Thanks again for your input!
that would sure be a feet requiring a lot of money, mounting beacons to all of the traffic lights and having all of the towns and cities signing off on it. you would have to get a team to mount and set them all up, hope your pockets are deep sir.
Liquid Tension, I preffer the Croudsourcing method, since it is cheaper, and more effective than the beacon-based method I mentioned in my previous post. The app will hopefully run on the Croud-sourcing method.
I am asking that the app not only be for the IPhone but cross platform to android. Believe it or not, that platform has grown and a lot of blind users who just use the android platform would benefit from your app. Before someone has the balls or ovaries to march over to the eyes-free list and tell all of us android user to just buy an IPhone, there are a group of users who simply do not want the restrictions put on a user by an IPhone.
If you're raising money for this, why not just raise to install audible signals at
traffic lights? Raise money to lobby your congressman for them. Seems you
could use your money in a lot better ways than an app.
The idea that most traffic lights have audible signals is not accurate where I live, sadly. I wish more did and that the process for requesting them wasn't so long. There's a horrific intersection that separates my neighborhood from a huge shopping center that has just about everything. It's sort of a T intersection between 2 busy county roads and a parking lot. It's scary as hell to cross so yes, an app like this would be useful in that situation. The crowd source method would work too as I could get my own crowd to contribute the intersections I most use that don't have good traffic flow.
I hope to make the app cross-platform, but would like to start with the Iphone because there are less variations in the quality of the phone's camera than with Android devices. Re: Cody's post and Audible Signals, it's not that my area doesn't have audible signals, it's that they're unreliable, and sometimes flat-out dangerous, not telling the user when it's safe to cross, or being entirely broken, (the visual light works, but the audible component does not.) Voting for the submissions ended today, so I should know whether I passed the first round by the end of March. I'll keep you all posted.
An update: Unfortunately, I didn't get past the first stage of this grant. I'm currently looking for programmers/developers who may be interested, but it may take a while to figure out how this could be achieved. If anything happens, I will keep you all in the loop.
I just found a developer who's interested in building this app. He had a great idea that I hadn't thought of. Instead of using the phone's camera to read traffic lights, why not have the phone connect to a city's central computer system which controls the traffic lights, and gather information from there? His idea seems much more sensible and less error-prone than using computer vision, and needing to be very precise with the camera. What do you guys think? I will keep you posted. Thankss!
if you can get cities to agree with that, and you can deal with latency issues and people with slower connections, it sounds much mor practical.
The problem I see with this, although it's a great solution. It's really hard to get cities to ad-hoc continue to update modules to support these things.
Think about location beacons, something BlindSquare and other apps support. I've yet to see one, and Portland Oregon is pretty progressive in quite a few ways. Though admittedly not always for the blind. But it's really good with transportation and the like, yet you don't see location beacons used.
I really like the idea of this app. It would be really useful, especially when at a
light without an audible signal. I would even be willing to pay for the app.
I am skeptical of this. It sounds like an interesting enough idea, but I think
listening and/or sited assistance is still the best method! I don't trust this just
as I don't trust audio signals. computer error is possible. Especially the new way
you're doing it.