[Mi-abs] Improved Accessible Pedestrian Signals for Visually-Impaired Users

[Darian]

Hi Navdeep,
 My name is Darian and I am a subscriber to the Michigan Association of blind students list.
I do not currently live in Michigan, but I have lived in and do live in cities where audible pedestrian signals occur. 
I do agree with you that these audible pedestrian signals are expensive to deploy and are are put into place infrequently.
I'm curious as to your personal experience with these devices. Are you yourself Blind? Do you come across them often enough, how affective have you found them for yourself?
 As to the practicality of your proposal, it seems very interesting and seems like an intelligent thing to consider.
The only concerns I have off the top of my head on that it assumes that each person affected by this new technology would have a smart phone, that it is predicate it       That a persons phone would be able to successfully use this technology and that it will be reliable considering the various states of effectiveness one smart phone might work in.
Consider the battery power a smart phone might have when it is newly bought versus A year after it's been purchased or  two years out.
It's battery power is less effective, and functionality is compromised as a result.
A stance that members of the federation had taken the Re: audible pedestrian signals has been that while audible pedestrian signals can be helpful, and it may very well be more effective to use the money otherwise used to build these devices to see that more blind people are trained up on the non visual techniques blind people use to identify and analyze and cross intersections that very in size and  complexities effectively. 
I'm interested to hear your thoughts and will take this opportunity to stop writing for now.
Besides, I'm dictating and as you can tell, it is not working quite well for me.
Hopefully I will be at my computer the next time we correspond.
Regards,
Darian

Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 14, 2016, at 10:00 AM, Navdeep Bagga via Mi-abs <mi-abs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> My name is Navdeep and I am a master’s student at the University of
> Michigan School of Information. I am writing a paper on improved accessible
> pedestrian signals for blind and visually-impaired users. The current
> implementation, the Accessible Pedestrian Signal or APS (
> http://www.apsguide.org), is expensive and scarce across cities in the US.
> I am proposing a solution which involves installing bluetooth beacons on
> existing pedestrian signals (not just the APS) which can convey the status
> of the signal to the user on their smartphone which is bluetooth enabled
> and has the necessary app installed to listen to the bluetooth beacons. I
> am assuming that users are comfortable using screen readers on their
> smartphones.
> 
> I am writing to request people to answer the questions below or just have a
> discussion with me on this topic:
> 
>   1. Do you have any frustrations with APS?
>   2. What are your views about the desirability of the wireless status
>   system using a smartphone?
>   3. Do you have any concerns about the proposed solution?
> 
> Please reach out to me off list via email (navdeepb at umich.edu). Thank you!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Navdeep Singh Bagga
> navdeepb at umich.edu
> School of Information | Class of 2018
> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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