Discussion about Blind Accessibility - the next steps?
Well, the honeymoon period of my current job is pretty much over. It's not bad, don't get me wrong - but I don't feel that I'm going to be able to get the experience that I need here. I'm finding the environment in this sort of client facing work isn't going to work for the long run. I can deal with it for now, but I really need to focus on my own skills in my own time.
I kind of feel that in order to really jump-start my career I'm going to need to function as an independent entity from any corporation or something, build my own product so to speak. I think it might be a good idea for some of us to work together to develop some ideas? I was slightly inspired by the thread talking about real world problems that could be solved with blind technology.
I've had a few ideas for a while and one of the main frustrations with the audiogame scene is that nothing is really standardized. Imagine how awesome it would be if we had a simple t o use a single API to apply a basic level of accessibility to a game. Sure there are engines out there that are specifically designed for building audio games, but I mean having an interface that can be applied similarly to how standard software accessibility is meant to be used.
One of the biggest problems I notice with game accessibility is that large companies don't implement any accessibility and most times games must be navigated by basic sound cues - some games are better with this than others. Obviously a solution like this can't be applied to every game, but perhaps we can reduce the problem by making a viable API that can be implemented with other games.
One of the things I've been trying to work on in the last few years is develop a sufficient model for navigating 3D space as a blind user. At this point I have a theory for how blind people navigate in comparison to sighted people, but I need to experiment with it to really see for sure how it wor ks. I believe that by modelling these navigation patterns will help tremendously.
For those who are curious, I believe that people who are born blind navigate use a relative strategy to navigate and orient themselves, as opposed to the visual model which is absolute. By this, I mean that a blind person remembers locations based on what is next to a location - over a large area, a blind person can locate objects by basically building a mental "path" of relative objects. A sighted person can just see an object and therefore can calculate that path dynamically.
People who go blind adapt towards using this strategy but aren't as efficient. Sighted people rarely use this navigation technique, which means that in certain situations, blind people should outperform sighted people, specifically low light conditions. In addition, blind people perform least effectively in situations where locations change frequently in no generalized pattern.
My largest frustra tion with my current situation is I feel like I can't work with enough people with my ideas; this is partially my own fault, trying to be a lone wolf for such a long time; so perhaps I figured I should try to reach out here? I feel that once I'm able to get a functioning product, me or my team can finally go to an investor and actually make a workable product and potentially jump start the new accessibility wave.
I think understanding this will be the best way to model blind navigation digitally which can help build a navigational API for the blind in mainstream 2D (and potentially 3D) environments. However I think translating "distance" will be the hardest thing.
I've also wanted to build a note taker. However I don't have any electrician or hardware skills relevant to build any hardware. Frustrating.
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