Hi,
So I took a couple of navilense tags with me today for my mobility lesson.
I asked Mary, The Wonderful, if she would mind helping me with a little
experiment. Of course, she said "yes", but I could tell she had her misgivings,
roughly along the same lines as here, you know the sort of thing, "you mustn't
weaken your core cane skills, and might it not be a distraction? What if the
signal goes down? What if there's somthing blocking your line of sight? So, I
made her the same answers that I have made here, with the addition of "if there
is something blocking my line of sight, then it is blocking my clear path
across the road, so, useful to know! Winwin!
She went across the road and tried holding the tag against a bollard, near
the crossing point. Here I discovered my first assumption, I.E., this proved
too narrow to hold the tag in a flat enough plane. So we just tried it with her
holding the tag. The road is about 20 feet across, and my phone picked it up,
no problem! I proceeded to cross, with the phone giving me indicators that I
was on path, I didn't try to do it exactly, not necessary, just enough on
track to be roughly straight. You could be more exact, but I was trying to keep
it real and not be distracted. by the time we had repeated this a few times on
a few crossings, I was nipping over in jig time, nice and straight and not
distracted at all!
You can set it to voice, voice with sounds and just sounds. I had it set to
both voice and sound, as I was practising, but for best results, I reckon just
sounds would be the most intuitive and least distracting. However, with the
voice it is nice to hear "3 meters, 2 meters 1 meter!" and you know you are
there!!
By the end, Mary was quite onboard with the whole concept. She has been
making notes and forwarding them the correct office in Irish Guide Dogs, for
recommending tactiles etc, but we both know, this is not going to happen any
time soon, so, something that works, even if it is just in the short term, is
potentially valuable to me and, perhaps, for others. We noted that you need to
use the largest of the tags, to ensure finding them from a reasonable
distance. This means that if I want to map the centre of Clonmel, I will have
to use reprints of my 1 large tag and they will all have to have the same
title. So, "crossing" Smaller tags would also be useful in shop windows, as I
would be walking past them, much nearer. This could help, not only for finding
shops, but also as a general way-marker. If I can get this sorted, in a very
basic manner, I shall contact the council and see if I can get it done properly
by the professionals from navilense.
Meanwhile, I sent a link to a discussion about something called "Navibelt"
which, as I see, Garry is interested. I too think it looks OK, but costs nearly
2000, and really, its main advantage over using the compass built in on the
phone, is its ability to do a thing called "bee-line" which, by the way, the
built-in compass can do, just doesn't seem to do it with voice-over. If anyone
can get this to work with VO, or with another compass app, or, indeed, on
Android, please let me know, it would be even easier than my navilense
solution, but I will still go about mapping Clonmel with navilense, because it
has many other uses.
Last of all, I had my jab, had a slightly sore arm and slept on and off for
a day and a half, am perfectly well now and have badges, proclaiming that I
have had the vaccination!"
Happy travels! Sandy. -
Sent from The dark side of the moon
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