Georgie: Smartphone For the Blind and Visually Impaired 77
hypnosec writes "A specially designed smartphone for the visually impaired or partially sighted has been launched in the UK. The device, dubbed Georgie, has many special features including a voice-assisted touch screen and apps that will allow for easy completion of day-to-day tasks like catching a bus, reading printed text and pinpointing a location. Designed by a blind couple, Roger and Margaret Wilson-Hinds, and named after Mrs Wilson-Hind's guide dog, the smartphone is powered by the Android operating system and uses handsets like Samsung XCover and Galaxy Ace 2, notes the BBC. The main reason for developing such a phone, according to the couple, was that they wanted to get the technology across to people with very little or no sight. 'It's exactly the type of digital experience we want to make easily available to people with little or no sight,' said Roger."
Here's an Idea (Score:1)
Is there a smartphone for submitters who can't write a coherent or properly constructed English sentence to save their lives?
Re:Here's an Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi. I'm a computer scientist who spent a few months volunteering in rural Africa. You know what I saw? Cell phones everywhere. Those starving kids can barely feed themselves, but they have a cell phone. You see, the cell phone connects them to their father who moved to the city to earn enough to feed them, and with the cell phone, they pay about 10 cents a week to periodically call him and say what they need. Then he goes to market, buys a sack of rice, some spices, and whatever else they can afford, and makes the day-long trek back to the village to feed his family. In previous decades, the communication wouldn't be possible, so the family would gamble on how long they could stretch food until the father was scheduled to return, If they guessed too long, they run out of food, and have to go hungry (or pay higher local prices) until the father came back. If they guessed too short, the father makes extra trips (which cost about a full day's wage).
Granted, the starving families didn't often have smartphones, but they did have old Nokia models and cheap Chinese phones. Smartphones weren't even that big in America while I was there, so I'd expect to find a good number of them in Africa now. First-world technology doesn't just stay in the first world. Like everything other technology, it spreads across the globe, generally improving lives.
So now I ask, what are you doing about the problem of starving children in Africa? Trolling on Slashdot won't help them, nor will throwing insults at your fellow man. In fact, that haste to insult is exactly part of the problem: There is plenty of food in most areas of Africa, with massive surpluses in some regions. Due to tribal and religions politics, the trade is severely restricted. In some cases, children are trained from birth to hate people from other tribes, and that the other tribes don't deserve to have possessions. When these children grow up, they're the perpetrators of the genocides, crop burnings, and highway robberies that disrupt the distribution of food.
Let's lead by example. Support endeavors for their merits, and respect all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, age, or any other criteria. Let's just try to play nice, and help those we can, either directly or indirectly.
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FarmVille is not real.
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It's not like they have to pay for those...
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When I was there, condoms ran about 15 cents each, which was the price of a small meal for one person from a street vendor. They were sold in boxes with porn on the package.
Birth control pills were only rarely available, because you had to find a doctor who would actually support their use. Unfortunately a few unscrupulous Christian missionaries have managed to spread misinformation about the rates of side effects.
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What local dictators should be overthrown, and who should replace them? A foreign leader won't be accepted by the locals, and a local will have the same millennia-long history of tribal politics swaying their decisions. Sure, you could go for that silly "democracy" thing, but who will run the elections? More locals who have been taught that the tribe is more important than the nation?
No, the first step is acceptance of each other, and more reliable distribution of resources. After that, the tribes can live
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Wow. AC got pwned.
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True, but I didn't write the post for the mods. I wrote it because it pisses me off to see a troll talking about the starving kids in Africa that he's never seen and really doesn't care about. I wrote it mostly to blow off a bit of steam and partly to express what I saw firsthand.
However, the +1 mods do help to spread ideas. Currently my comment is the only +5 on this article, and that puts it on the RSS feed and in AlterSlash, too. Maybe, just maybe, someone will read it and decide to do something more mea
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Oh look, another Slashdot AC troll who thinks a handful of paragraphs explains a person.
My opinion of African politics comes mostly from the collective opinions of a group of Peace Corps volunteers I met, who had all been in their projects at least a year already. I asked them why it seemed so hard to get anything done in my own project, and they explained the political problems they'd run into. The next few months reaffirmed what they'd said, to the point where I saw a small labor dispute (where one trades
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what are you doing about the problem of starving children in Africa?
By not directly contributing to the problems caused by supplying free food, medicine, etc.
Re:Here's an Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Those problems really depend on what organizations you're dealing with. I was volunteering with an organization that collected school supplies. I brought a whole suitcase of miscellaneous supplies, and it went right into the storage closet at the school I was teaching in. I brought some food, too, which I cooked up personally and brought to an end-of-term party for the students, supplementing their rice-and-peanuts lunch with a small bowl of macaroni and cheese.
The majority of "free stuff" problems come from charities that don't actually have people on the ground managing the whole project end-to-end. Some American charity will gather cans of food, ship them to some government contact, and that corrupt contact will just take the food and hand it out however he wants (according to the aforementioned tribal and familial prejudices), maybe being considerate enough to forge a nice letter from a local chief.
In contrast, one well-known organization whose volunteers I met was Peace Corps. Their volunteers are dropped alone into some of the worst-off villages, with some survival gear (water purifier, first aid supplies, and whatever region-specific resources they need), project plans (for projects like preparing farmland, building granaries, or digging wells) and access to liaisons for anything else they need. Typically, the village chiefs have worked for years to get a volunteer, so their work is almost always greatly appreciated by the locals, and especially the ones who look past the politics toward the future of the village. I was told a story about a female Peace Corps volunteer who was attacked, and the chief lined up everyone in the village for her to pick out the attacker.
That's the kind of organization that does the most good: where the entire process is under the supervision of people with nothing to gain, and the "handouts" don't start until the entire local society is heavily invested. Then there's enough riding on the project's success that the local tribal chiefs will be honestly supportive, and the villagers won't disappoint the chiefs. There's still no guarantee of absolute success, but at least the local politics will work in the project's favor.
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Would you deny a meal to a starving person standing in front of you because it will contribute to other problems? How is it different if you deny it from a distance?
Okay so some aid is misdirected/misused/etc -- but that's no reason to throw your hands in the air, say the problem is too hard, and ignore it completely.
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I do believe children and adults starve in other places besides Africa. Unless you mean this rhetorically, this smacks too much of First World guilt. Better for me would be this: what are you doing about that starving homeless person down the street? If it's his choice or his fault, then leave him alone. If not, then handing him a sandwich or a blanket would be doing just as much good as sending over money to some far-off coun
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GP was responding to a particularly stupid point by an AC, and just used the AC's example for rhetorical efficacy. Now, if you want to tell the original troll that he was being narrow minded, be my guest.
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I absolutely agree. There are needs for volunteers in every city in every country, needing practically every skill. The troll mentioned a subject I actually have firsthand knowledge of, and pissed me off. As an aside, I personally don't do much for the local homeless. My wife's the one who manages an annual fundraiser and awareness event with a local youth group.
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Perhaps if the culture didn't promote having 10 or preferably more kids the ones they do have would be better off?
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Without looking too deeply into it (as details on the page are sparse), I see limited use. A pure mesh network won't really function too well beyond village limits, where you'll find one farm every few kilometers. Within a rural village, there aren't (or weren't in 2009) that many smartphones, so I don't see the mesh networking as being too helpful there.
However, what is interesting is that the Serval project appears to work on Wi-Fi, which might allow it to function as a fully-functional Internet connectio
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I haven't seen a submitter write anything, period, in ages - generally submissions appear to be lifted verbatim from the first linked page. That's the case here as well.
Given this state of affairs, I'm not sure why Slashdot credits submitters with these stories at all... the submitter isn't really contributing anything to the process in most cases.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Voice-Driven Smart Phones are a lot more (Score:3)
That's a good start, and Android's tools for doing speech-to-text translation (not only for texting, but for most applications) are also a good start, but it's not the same as having a phone UI that's voice-centric, rather than a screen-centric UI which also has voice support.
Some friends of mine were working on that back during the boom (a few grad students, and a bad entrepreneur you and I know), but it didn't really take off. It's probably a lot more practical now that we're carrying computers with anot
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Doesn't Android include something equivalent to iOS's VoiceOver [apple.com]
-jcr
That doesn't matter. Android has multiple systems for the blind, just like it has multiple systems for the sighted. It's a thriving ecosystem where the user gets to choose what fits their individual needs the best.
Case in point, I'm not blind, and Android has a truly awesome default stock keyboard and auto-completion algorithm, especially with Android 4.1, but my favorite keyboard is still going to be Swiftkey X, because it lets me mix languages on the fly when I email family members. To me, that kind of a
It DOES matter (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't matter. Android has multiple systems for the blind, just like it has multiple systems for the sighted. It's a thriving ecosystem where the user gets to choose what fits their individual needs the best.
No they do not.
Not when it comes to something like voice assistance. That requires some thought from the developer, and some API assistance from the system.
Using VoiceOver a user can easily expire a touch interface while blind and make sense of how to use the system. With a very tiny amount of w
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http://eyes-free.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/documentation/android_access/index.html
You mean like these ones? These are the default that are included with most / all vanilla Android installs (it was on my phone).
Or is it only one company can do this? Are you stupidly delusional? Or do the blind "expire" a touch interface?
Maybe the voice assistant can make them wait for 5-10 seconds while "i'm looking that up for you", while the Android user gets their info in less than a second? (see the many comparison vi
No, not at all like that (Score:2)
You mean like these ones?
No, note how your site says EXPLICITLY that accessibility is not available in all applications.
With voiceover, pretty much ANY iOS application that uses the Apple UI elements (basically every one except for games) can be used by Voiceover. It does not mean a core set of system apps works with voiceover, it means that even some random app developed by a guy who never considered accessibility can still be used fairly easily with VoiceOver.
Geordi (Score:4, Funny)
Helping blind people, it should be dubbed Geordi!
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A blind man teaching an android how to paint?
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A blind man teaching an android how to paint?
If anyone on the Enterprise should be teaching how to paint, it should be Picard. The line must be drawn here!
Phone Accessories for the Blind (Score:3)
They should look at integrating with blue tooth shoes too. Funny to see more than one story about smart phone technology for the visually impaired in the same day.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/07/footwear-blind?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/bluetoothshoes [economist.com]
The shoes have an actuator in the heel which can vibrate to signal when to turn or alert the presence of an obstacle, a sensor in the toe for detecting obstacles, and blue tooth for phone app integration.
Smartphone for the deaf (Score:3)
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It's called text messaging.
No, it isn't. Stop being a smart ass and re-read his post, then you'll see why.
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So have I, and this is great if they're talking with somebody who knows sign language. I was hoping for a solution that lets them talk on the phone to everybody else, like when they get a voice call from somebody who doesn't speak sign.. I wasn't asking for a sign-language to some spoken language with visual to speech recognition translator though - I know that's a long way off. Some day though...
A universal speech translator, so I could talk with people I don't share a common language with would be nic
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Probably because they're very likely illiterate and, consequently, can't make use of text messaging services.
Deaf schools need to be held to a standard -- any standard. The majority of HS graduates from our nations top schools for the deaf are reading at a 3rd-grade level. That's just unacceptable. It may also explain why unemployment in the deaf community is so high.
Either that or they're lazy shitheads who think it's just tops being deaf, don't see it as a disability, and refuse any and all medical and
blind access for Android (Score:2, Informative)
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If you want to use voice over you need at least an iPhone 3GS or later.
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You do realize that the famous shock jo.... radio host you listen to fed you all that so you keep listening to the ads that sponsor his show, right?
Note to mods: Yes, this is off-topic, you'll get no whining from me for modding this down. It's just terrifying to me that many of these ditto-head idiots can legally vote.
Windows 8 Metro (Score:2)
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it ape's the style, but it isn't like metro - and it's an android phone.
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Should it be called Geordi? (Score:1)
Red flag warning (Score:2, Funny)
American's With Disability Act (Score:2)
Apple (Score:2, Troll)
I'm not an Apple fan, but I have been impressed with things a blind coworker has told me about the iPhone and iPad. All sorts of free software on those devices, out of the box, that lets him use both of those devices without a hitch. Apple did this without any group getting on their case, which coworker told me is the usual path for getting things that work for the blind.
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I'm a troll for literally and simply writing that I am not an Apple fan?
What about latest Android versions? (Score:2)
I have ICS in my Galaxy S2 but I must admit I haven't really tested the accesibility features and a blind person would be a much better judge anyway.
Voice Over vs. Talkback Vs the rest (Score:1)
Windows Phone Apollo 8 (Score:1)
Awesome phone (Score:1)