Hi eweryone!
I am not a developer but I have a question or the appeal to developers of
qgis or qgis plugins.
My name is Stefan and I am from Slovakia. I am a blind user of computer. I am
using a screenreader which reads me a text from screen. So I cann work with
texts, e-mail, webpages or sounds but no with pictures and maps. But I am
interested in geography and for a long time I am searching some possibility how
could the blind browse the maps. I would like to know how the world looks,
which countryes are around my country etc. I think that the sole possibility
for blind is a reverse geocoding when I types some gps coordinates and the
application or webservice returns me the information about locality. I used a
Nominatim service for this point, and it was great to see which countryes are
below my slovakia (when I step by step typed to Nominatim the 48,18 coordinates
and then went to south by decrementing the latitude from 48 to 45, 40 to 0).
But Nominatim is not reliable source of informations because Nominatim has not
implemented a seas and oceans as areas. So when I typed some coordinates for
example on Adriatic sea, Nominatim returns the nearest city or country and the
result was uncorrect for me.
I am little programming in Delphi and I tried to parse an osm files
(openstreetmaps). I cann read the informations about nodes or acquire all tags
of nodes but I am not able to draw the areas which are in osm files represented
as relations.
Now I found Qgis, I installed it and inported the osm file with map of my
country (Slovakia) to Qgis. I am blind so I cann not work with wievs or graphs.
But I would like create my own sqlite database with informations about cityes
and countryes as a map for me as blind. My idea is that I split the inported
map to little virtual squares by 0.01x0.01 and to each square add an
information about country and city. Then will be very simple for me to browse a
map with left right up and down arrowkey because when I will to increment or
decrement latitude or longitude, the application will search the relevant
square in database and tell me where I am on the map.
Dear developers, please, it would be possible create some plugin for Qgis
which browses the inported map from west to east and from north to south step
by step and on each 0.01x0.01 square detects inside which polygons is this
square situated? For example - I download from openstreet webpage the map of
Slovakia, inport it to Qgis and run the plugin. The slovakia.osm file contains
informations for rectangle
<bounds minlat="47.72" minlon="16.82" maxlat="49.62" maxlon="22.570"/>
there are 190 lines and 575 columns it gives
cca 110000 squares together. The plugin creates a sqlite database and writes
the informations about each square to them. I dont need the addresses
housenumbers or other points. Only countryes, cityes or other polygons are
interesant for me. After this conversion I could browse the map in the simple
application in which I could increment and decrement latitude and longitude by
left right up and down arrow and the application could search in database the
relevant information and tell me where I am. With so plugin I could convert
more countryes and I could to have a special "map for blind".
Please is this my idea very fantastic or would it possible to make?
PS: I searched also online reverse geocoding services for this point but the
problem is that online services are limited and only my small country needs
110000 requests and if I wanted to process the whole of Europe, it would take a
very long time. So I think that this task is better to do ofline at home.
Thanks
Stefan
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