Can an AI based app give the seeing impaired and blind a set of digital eyes?
My maternal grandmother was blind. She became blind due to glaucoma, a disease that back in the 1930’s and 1940’s had no treatment that could keep her from going blind. So from a very early age I became acquainted with someone with a serious disability. In fact, by the time I was three I actually became part of the caretaker crew and would often lead her around the house and be her eyes as we navigated the various obstacles in the home.
At one point my aunt, who was her primary caretaker, blindfolded me and had me try to get around the house with it on so that I could understand what my grandmother went through every day of her life. This had a profound effect on me and it has made me much more sensitive to the world of the blind and those who have various disabilities. And after my triple bypass in 2012, I was very limited in what I could do and had to use a walker and cane for a month to keep steady. This experience added to my sensitivity towards the disabled.
As a person who is tied to the tech world, I have tried to imagine how technology could be used to help the blind, and have often written about how apps like audio books, speech reading apps, hand held scanners and other technologies could be used to help improve their lives. I have even gone as far as to explore with a programmer friend to try and think of an app that could make navigating their world easier.
I recently ran across an article in Forbes by Seth Porges, one of their contributors. In this article, he writes about meeting with a 19-year old man named Juan Pablo Ortiz, who created an app specifically for a sight impaired friend.
He quotes Ortiz as saying “I wanted to make an application to help blind people improve their everyday lives,” Ortiz, who looks every bit the teenager he is, says of his app, “it can tell you what’s on a medical prescription or what type of money you’re holding. It can even scan a person and tell you if it’s a boy or girl, approximately what age they are, and what that person is doing.”
Porges was shown a demo of the app, which is named Avi, and explains that “after pointing it at various objects and documents, the app quickly relayed information such as ‘refrigerator’ or the exact text printed on a piece of paper. The app is currently in beta while Ortiz improves its accuracy, works out bugs, and increases the range of objects the app can detect. He eventually plans to make it a free download for iOS, Android, and Windows 10; with a planned public release in October.”
The article goes on to say that in the future Ortiz would like to add some type of voice assistant to it such as Siri or Cortana, and given the fact that Apple has recently opened up the APIs on Siri, he should be able to add that to the iOS version of this app relatively soon.
What stopped me in my tracks as I read this story is that in a sense, a smartphone using an app like Avi is now doing the task for the blind that my three-year-old self did for my grandmother.
If only my grandmother had lived in our day and time. Technology advances have helped the blind and people with disabilities in so many ways. The blind and those with sight impairments, with the help of something like Apple’s VoiceOver option on Mac OS, can access emails and send emails by voice and use a computer to some degree like their friends and family. And programs like Dragon Dictate are a godsend for those with impaired eyesight or are blind.
As one who is very sensitive to issues concerning the blind, I am excited about the constant advances in AI, more accurate scanners and speech-to-text technology. They continue to make it possible for those with sight impairments and blindness to have lives that are relatively normal given their disabilities, and the Avi app is another great example of a tech tool that adds a richer dimension to the world around them.
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