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Harish Kotian.
Engineers creating technology to help blind people navigate the world must
overcome myriad challenges, as Susan Young learns. Illustrated by Sarah Chen
and Emily M. Eng.
Illustration: Sarah Chen
Brent Gifford is searching for a sign-nothing supernatural, just a small
picture that looks like a color wheel with only four colors. It should be
somewhere
in this room. He pulls out his smart phone, adjusts a few settings, and holds
it in the center of his chest, camera facing out. He begins rotating the phone
side to side, scanning the room.
Gifford is blind, and it's up to the phone to spot the sign. He's testing an
experimental application for smart phones that could one day help blind people
navigate through unfamiliar territory. By using their camera phones and some
strategically placed graphic signs, the visually impaired could find bathrooms
in buildings they've never visited or learn which bus routes come to a
particular stop.
The system is one of the projects in the Assistive Technology Lab at UC Santa
Cruz. Led by computer engineers Roberto Manduchi and Sri Kurniawan, the lab
creates tools to help people with disabilities. Many of the tools are geared
toward helping the blind and visually impaired. In addition to the mobile
navigator, the lab's researchers are developing computer programs to help blind
people prepare documents that meet business standards, and even a module so the
blind can rock out with Rock Band.
The engineers ask visually impaired community members to test and critique
their prototypes. Gifford, a professional magician and a clinical
hypnotherapist, is one of their more experienced testers. He's thoroughly
examined about a dozen devices for different companies, and he's put his hands
on many more.
The mobile navigator, he says, feels like a winner: "I don't think there's
anything close to this particular product right now."
The Great Blindini
As a teenager in the late 1970s, Gifford tested one of the first optical
character recognition (OCR) systems for Kurzweil Technologies. "I was a guinea
pig," says Gifford, "the blind guy at the end of the chain." He continued to
work for Kurzweil, traveling all over the country to teach others how to use
the then-bulky OCR machine. He even spoke before U.S. Senate subcommittees,
testifying about why the government should fund a machine that could read to
blind people.
Gifford became blind at age 11 when his retinas detached, the result of a
genetic disorder that prevents connective tissue from forming. By age 12, he
started doing magic, tricking the eyes of his seeing audience. He wanted to
take on the most visual performance art he could think of, and magic-with its
misdirection, optical illusion, and face reading-fit the bill. At 16, he
adopted the stage name "The Great Blindini."
Now 51, Gifford performs for children and adults around central and northern
California.
Gifford attributes his popularity as a technology tester to two things: He can
write a coherent evaluation ("as opposed to 'it doesn't work, but I don't know
why,'" he jokes), and he's a trained magician. In that role, he often thinks,
"That's impossible, how am I going to do it?" when designing tricks. Similarly,
many assistive tools may have at one time seemed out-of-this-world. But now
handheld readers can pronounce text on a page, and cell phones with a camera
and the right assistive app
can identify a jar of Skippy peanut butter.
Follow that phone
The engineers in the Assistive Technology Lab aim to harness such
ever-improving smart-phone cameras and processors to help the visually impaired
find their way through unfamiliar territory. White canes and guide dogs can
help users avoid curbs and couches, but they can't reveal which door leads to
the dentist's office. And while GPS is great for trips from home to the center
of town, it doesn't offer enough resolution to help blind people find the right
door to knock on-and it doesn't work indoors.
For instance, when a blind person goes to a new hospital, how can she find the
right doctor's office or a bathroom without resorting to asking strangers for
help? You would like a system to give turn-by-turn directions, says Manduchi.
To do that, you need two things: a map, and a way to understand where you are.
His proposed solution is a system of colorful "landmarks" that a camera phone
would recognize. He and his colleagues have developed smart phone programs that
pick out landmarks with color patterns that correspond to a particular
location. In the same way that a lost sighted person looks for directional
signs or labels on doors, a blind person would use this system to figure out
where to go next.
"Room 111, to the left," imagines Manduchi.
Photo: Susan Young
UC Santa Cruz computer engineer Roberto Manduchi with a "landmark," which blind
users will find with cellphone cameras to help them navigate.
The landmarks look like four-slice pies of four different colors. The
arrangement of colors encodes each landmark's identity. Ideally, the phone's
memory will already contain a building map. Then, the phone would provide audio
directions (e.g., "turn left") to guide the user.
"The map is something that theoretically you can get, but it's not that easy,"
Manduchi says. "Not all places give away maps."
As a user scans the room, the software looks for a pattern of four pixels
spaced like the four corners of a square. If the phone finds four pixels that
match the four-color pattern of a landmark, it runs more tests to check that
the object is pie-shaped. The system works for landmarks close to the camera's
lens or on a distant wall.
The researchers chose colors that stand out against many backgrounds and in
different lighting conditions. Initially, they used red, blue, black and white
landmarks from desktop printers. But now the group makes green, orange, black
and white landmarks by gluing together colored papers with a matte finish,
making phone detections more reliable.
Making sense of a live video feed is a challenge, too. The images are often
blurry, especially if users move the phone too quickly when scanning a room.
Manduchi's group is working to better process such less-than-ideal data by
assessing the angle and position of the phone. Those details come from a smart
phone's internal compass, gyroscope, and accelerometer.
A problem of perception
Underlying these engineering issues is the foremost task: designing useful and
practical tools that meet the particular needs of the impaired users. "Very
often, sighted people who are creating technology for blind and visually
impaired folks are operating out of the best intentions and out of true
altruism," says Brad Hodges, a blind national technology program associate with
the American Foundation for the Blind
in New York. "That being said, those developers are influenced by general
societal attitudes about blindness-some of which are correct, and some of which
are very much in error."
Manduchi, who moved to UCSC in 2001 after working in the machine vision field
for Apple and NASA, is familiar with tailoring projects to specific audiences.
Although he now knows how important it is to get user input, he acknowledges
that he didn't always do so. One of his first projects at UCSC was a "virtual
white cane," a hand-held laser device that measured distances between users and
objects in their path. But after talking with lots of blind people, he decided
that other directions of research would be more promising.
"Blind people who use a white cane usually love their cane," he says. "If you
try to substitute their cane with something more technological, you're going to
fight an uphill battle. The cane is simple, the cane is cheap, it doesn't
break, it doesn't have batteries, it tells when you are about to trip onto
something, it tells you if there is a drop-off. So the cane is quite a good
device."
Part of the challenge is that the audience of potential users is diverse. There
are 1.3 million legally blind people in the U.S., according to the National
Federation of the Blind, with varying degrees of impairment. Fewer than one of
every 1,000 people is totally blind. Just like the rest of the population, the
visually impaired vary in many ways: the type of town they call home, their
lifestyle preferences, whether they have additional disabilities. That means a
given assistive device will have fewer potential users than raw population
numbers would suggest.
Furthermore, blind people generally aren't affluent. Some 70% are unemployed,
according to the American Foundation for the Blind. The group's small size also
makes affordable commercialization more difficult. A small number of products
must absorb the costs of research and development.
Write the right way
But there are success stories. Some of the best tools for the visually impaired
help users read printed and electronic documents. Scanners fitted with OCR
software can read the text on sheet of paper aloud to a user, while
screen-reader programs give voice to digital words on a computer screen.
But what if a blind person must create a digital document for sighted people to
read? While screen readers allow blind people to listen to the words they
write, they don't alert users to a switch in capitalization or
right-justification in a paragraph. These formatting changes could be a
mistake-and might cause trouble for the blind author.
"Even though the document recipient knows you are blind, you are still expected
to have a certain level of quality formatting and layout," says Kurniawan, who
came to UCSC in 2008.
While working at the University of Manchester in the U.K. in 2003, Kurniawan
developed a program that describes the formatting and layout of a completed
document using speech. Now, with a recent grant from the National Science
Foundation, Kurniawan plans to revamp the program to communicate formatting
changes in real time with sound effects instead of words. With that upgrade,
users will avoid the tedious process of checking a document after it's been
written.
Because the text will get priority for words that the user hears, the program
will not confuse the user by describing the formatting in speech. Rather, it
will use sounds and changes in pitch to communicate formatting changes. For
example, tinkling piano keys will indicate that a font is italicized. A
higher-pitched voice will denote a word in all capital letters.
Technology adviser Hodges notes that even a program that checks the formatting
of a completed document has potential for wide-reaching success. Large groups
could benefit, such as federal agencies that require particular formatting
styles, he suggests. Such a program could be adapted so that these groups could
check huge numbers of documents, written by and for sighted users, for proper
style.
It goes both ways
Hodges points to many examples of accommodations developed to help the
disabled, such as ramps in airports, that were later widely adopted. Even the
commonplace keyboard, the offshoot of the typewriter, has roots in an assistive
technology: "In the 19th century an Italian fellow invented the typewriter so
his lady consort could write to him. She was blind," says Hodges. Writing by
quill and ink was a challenge for the blind, and the tool to solve that problem
was later adapted universally. And in the other direction, today's mainstream
products-such as the iPhone-now come out-of-the-box with accessibility options
for the visually impaired.
Following that beat, Kurniawan has developed Rock Vibe, a module that enables a
gamer to play Harmonix's Rock Band video game without looking at musical cues
scrolling on the TV screen. Instead, a blind user straps on five vibrating
strips: two on the wrists, two on the upper arms, and one on an ankle. When a
particular strip vibrates, the virtual rock star hits the corresponding
drumhead.
"I'd heard so much about [Rock Band] but had never been able to play it because
it's completely visual," says Caitlin Hernandez, a blind UCSC student who
tested Rock Vibe. "I thought it was really creative that they thought of
incorporating something tactile to make it accessible."
There are many online games for blind people, Hernandez says, but "they're sort
of pale imitations of popular video games." Rock Vibe is unique. "I never heard
of a [mainstream] game being adapted. Everybody plays Rock Band; it's a huge
party game," she says. "I thought it was interesting that they were trying to
adapt it as opposed to making something that was similar to it, which is what I
feel like the other games on the market for the blind are doing."
Finding the way
Back at the testing site, Brent Gifford's phone has detected a colored
pie-shaped landmark.
"Beep!"
"Four meters ahead," declares a metallic voice. He walks across the room and
reaches the landmark.
The mobile navigator is one of the few technologies Gifford has tested that
could succeed, he says. "It has the potential to be useful to the majority of
blind people, because cell phones are part of everyday life."
Indeed, smart-phone-based technologies may be the way to go for many assistive
tools. They're becoming more common among the visually impaired, and the
iPhone's accessibility options are coaxing more blind customers toward Apple.
The greatest advantage of developing assistive technologies for smart phones is
that the end users probably own one already. New games based on smart phones
may reach other users in need, too [see sidebar: iHealth Help].
Manduchi's navigation would require some changes to infrastructure, such as
putting up enough landmark signs in buildings. However, those kinds of mandates
are possible under the American with Disabilities Act of 1990. Taking a cue
from Gifford, another young blind person may one day speak before a U.S. Senate
subcommittee, testifying why it's time to truly help the blind make their own
way through the world.
Sidebar: iHealth Help
Computer engineer Sri Kurniawan thinks assistive technologies shouldn't be
limited to people with physical or cognitive disabilities. "If somebody is
illiterate, they are not traditionally disabled, but it is a disabling
condition," she says. Likewise, if people can't afford insurance, they might
have a lower quality of life. She thinks human-computer interactions can help
these disadvantaged groups.
One of Kurniawan's graduate students at UC Santa Cruz has created a
mobile-phone-based game to motivate teenagers to get up and move. "The idea is
to focus on teenagers so that they are still at an age where they could change
their habits," says Sonia Arteaga, the game's designer.
Illustration: Emily M. Eng
One game features lots of obstacles. The accelerometer of an iPhone can act as
a pedometer. When a high schooler takes a certain number of steps, the game
will present an obstacle-a cloud of mosquitoes, for instance. The player must
swat them away by waving her phone around to continue through the game.
Another game presents a find-the-object picture puzzle each time the user walks
a certain number of steps. To collect points and try new puzzles, the user must
keep moving.
Arteaga says teenagers who have tried the games like the challenges. They want
to try harder to get to levels they couldn't reach the first time around. She
hopes to add features that will allow users to do challenges with friends,
because the social aspects of gaming ranked high with teenagers in her user
studies.
Another of Kurniawan's students, Alexandra Holloway, is working on a different
health angle: preparing expecting parents for childbirth.
Illustration: Emily M. Eng
In her game, called "The Prepared Partner," a woman in labor starts the action.
The player must try to boost her physical health, perhaps by feeding her a
sandwich, or reduce her stress, such as with meditative chants. If her vital
stats get too low, a doctor will come to perform a Caesarean.
"The target audience is low-income and low-education women and their partners,"
Holloway says. That demographic is less likely to attend childbirth classes and
more likely to have costly interventions and unnecessary C-sections. "They are
also less likely to go out and get childbirth books and sit down and read 500
pages of how to help a woman in labor. But they are likely to play games," she
notes.
In an early test, players performed better on a quiz about labor and comforting
a woman during contractions after they had played The Prepared Partner. For
now, the game is available online, but Holloway plans to create a version for
smart phones.
Story (c) 2011 by Susan Young. For reproduction requests, contact the
Science Communication Program office.
"A problem is your chance to do your best."
with best wishes,
chetan kumar,
musician,
my skype ID:
chetansagar7
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