By Chris Kornelis
Since losing his vision at age 13, Erik Weihenmayer has summited
Mount Everest, white-water rafted and climbed frozen waterfalls.
But making soup in his kitchen presented a unique challenge. On a
frozen waterfall he could tap his ax against the ice to get a feel
for its density, but in the kitchen, he had no way to differentiate
between cans of tomato and chicken noodle.
Mr. Weihenmayer, 49 years old, found a solution in Microsoft
Corp.'s Seeing AI, a free app for the visually impaired. Among
other things, the app can recognize faces, identify money, read
handwriting and scan bar codes to differentiate between cans of
soup.
"It is a game-changer," says Nathan Brannon, a blind 54-year-old
Seattle resident who tests software for accessibility.
Seeing AI is just one of the artificial-intelligence-powered
products that are helping blind and vision-impaired people live
more independently. Improvements in voice recognition and computer
vision, along with machine learning, have led to specialized
products such as Seeing AI, as well as mainstream devices like the
Amazon Echo, that are allowing the visually impaired to tackle
everyday tasks sighted people take for granted. Advocates for the
blind say these technologies have the potential to fundamentally
change the mobility, employment and lifestyle of the blind and
vision-impaired.
Microsoft says it has no plans to monetize the app, which
launched in 2017, calling it part of the company's efforts to
empower all people, including those with disabilities.
Visual interpreter
Of course, many of the voice-activated devices that have become
powerful aids for the blind, such as Amazon's Echo and Google Home,
weren't specifically designed for them, or with philanthropy in
mind.
Mr. Weihenmayer, for example, uses Comcast's voice remote to
find TV shows, Apple's Siri to send texts and Amazon's Alexa to cue
up his favorite music.
Mike May and his wife, both of whom are blind, have about a
dozen Alexa-connected devices in their home that do everything from
turn off the lights to tell them when a load in the washing machine
will be done. "It's become so much a part of my life that I almost
don't even think about it anymore," says Mr. May, who works at
Wichita, Kan.-based Envision, a provider of services for the blind
and visually impaired.
Both Mr. May and Mr. Weihenmayer also use a product called Aira,
which uses glasses with a camera, sensors and network connectivity
to connect the visually impaired to human agents, who act as visual
interpreters. The reps can describe users' surroundings and assist
them with tasks such as online searches.
"They have it done in two minutes," Mr. May says of online
searches. "It takes me 10 times as long and I'm fairly
proficient."
Mr. May once used Aira, made by Aira Tech Corp., to get a
different look at Seattle's Pike Place Market, which he usually
navigates with the help of a guide dog. The Aira rep described the
scene in detail, Mr. May says, right down to the interesting
tattoos adorning a checkout person. The technology costs between
$89 (for 100 minutes) and $329 (unlimited minutes) a month, though
some hotels, airports and retailers offer free access to their
guests through a program called Aira Access.
"I think this technology gives people the confidence to go out
and explore unknown areas where you just might be a little bit
hesitant to go out as a blind person," says Mr. Weihenmayer, a
co-founder of No Barriers, a nonprofit that supports and advocates
for people with disabilities.
Aira uses artificial intelligence for some tasks already, such
as identifying pill bottles, says Suman Kanuganti, founder and
chief executive of Aira Tech. But he expects AI eventually to take
over more of the work the human reps are now doing, such as
navigating.
Aira has raised roughly $15 million from investors. Mr.
Kanuganti says its user base is in the low thousands and it has
provided more than one million minutes of services in more than
100,000 sessions.
One major hurdle to bringing specialized products for the blind
to market is the size and disposable income of the target audience.
The World Health Organization estimates that of the 253 million
people world-wide who live with vision impairment, 36 million are
blind. The Census Bureau estimates that more than seven million
Americans are visually impaired. Many of them are unemployed or
underemployed.
"You cannot build a business around only blind people," says Ziv
Aviram, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based OrCam, the maker of the
MyEye 2.0 device, which is targeted at people with low vision but
can be used by the blind, as well. "You can do philanthropy, but
not business."
MyEye 2.0 mounts onto the side of glasses and can recognize
money, faces and surroundings. When users point their fingers at
signs or menus, MyEye can read them. The device, which costs around
$4,500, in some cases is covered by the Department of Veterans
Affairs, as well as some workforce associations, OrCam says.
Robert Beckman, the CEO of Middleton, Wis.-based Wicab Inc.,
says his company's $8,000 BrainPort V100 device is out of reach for
most blind people. The device consists of a camera mounted to a
pair of sunglasses that relays images to a plate of sensors that
users hold in their mouths. The sensors electronically sketch an
image of what the user is looking at onto the user's tongue. So
far, Mr. Beckman says he has been unable to get Medicare to cover
the device, and insurance companies have covered it only on rare
occasions. As a result, the company has sold fewer than 100 units,
he says.
Built-in accessibility
As much as blind people need specialized technology, building
accessibility into mainstream products may be an even bigger need,
say advocates such as Mark Riccobono, president of the National
Federation of the Blind.
He points to the iPhone, which had accessibility built into it
from the beginning.
"I can go down to the Apple store and pay the same price and
triple-click the home button and I have VoiceOver," says Mr.
Riccobono, referring to a feature where the phone will describe
aloud what is happening on the screen. "That's built in, it's
great, it doesn't cost a penny extra."
One coming mainstream technology that could be life-changing for
the blind is the driverless car.
"Transportation can be a very large barrier in the lives of
blind people, " impeding everything from employment to education,
says Eric Bridges, executive director of the American Council of
the Blind. "Having the ability to have one of these vehicles come
and take you where you want to go, when you want to go, and not be
constrained by the paratransit system or the fixed-route system,"
promises a greater level of independence and freedom, he says.
In a white paper last year, the Ruderman Family Foundation,
which advocates for the inclusion of people with disabilities in
society, claimed self-driving vehicles "would enable new employment
opportunities for approximately two million individuals with
disabilities, and save $19 billion annually in health-care
expenditures from missed medical appointments."
Mr. Bridges and Mr. Riccobono are pushing manufacturers to keep
the blind in mind when designing driverless cars. Specifically,
they want the car's controls and console to be accessible to those
who can't see, which "probably means more than just having it
talk," says Mr. Riccobono.
Waymo -- Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving-car unit, which plans to
launch a self-driving-car service this year -- says it is putting
audio tools and Braille labels inside its cars to allow visually
impaired riders to do everything from pull the car over to call an
operator. "We continue to learn about the unique needs of different
riders, and what we learn will inform new features that will make
the experience accessible to people who have historically had to
rely on others to get around," Waymo said in its 2018 Safety
Report.
Anna Catherine Walker, a 17-year-old visually impaired
high-school junior in Mechanicsburg, Pa., says she, for one, can't
wait. "I live out in the middle of nowhere," she says. "I want to
be able to leave without having to drag someone along with me."
Baking accessibility into the driverless car and other
technology products could have ramifications beyond the
vision-impaired community. Anirudh Koul, a senior data scientist at
Microsoft who helped launch Seeing AI, says history is rife with
examples of products and technologies that were developed for or
inspired by the needs of the blind that resulted in mainstream
products -- such as audiobooks and scanners. He has already seen
mainstream crossover with Seeing AI, such as sighted customers in
Asia using the app to learn the English word for the object in
front of them, and technicians using the app to read hard-to-access
text on the back of servers.
Mr. Kornelis is a writer in Seattle. Email him at
reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 28, 2018 22:21 ET (02:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024