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<H3 class=headline><FONT face="Times New Roman"><A
href="http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-blind-are-reinventing-the-iphone/256589/">How
the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone</A>.</FONT></H3>
<DIV class=headline> </DIV>
<DIV class=metadata><SPAN class=authors><A class=author
href="http://m.theatlantic.com/liat-kornowski/"><FONT
face="Times New Roman">Liat Kornowski</FONT></A></SPAN><FONT
face="Times New Roman"> | May 2, 2012</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><I><FONT face="Times New Roman">At first many blind people thought that the
iPhone would never be accessible to them, with its flat glass screen. But the
opposite has proved true.</FONT></I></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"><EM></EM></FONT>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Maria Rios, 66, woke up at 6 am. She got out of
bed in her little second floor apartment on the north side of Central Park, and
checked her iPhone for the weather. Then she felt around in her closet, where
she had marked her navy blue garments with safety pins, to tell them apart from
her black ones. In the adjacent room, her roommate Lynette Tatum, 49, picked out
a white sweater and dark denim slacks. She used her VizWiz iPhone app to take a
photograph and send it to a customer-service rep who lets her know what color
the item is.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">For the visually impaired community, the
introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster -- the
standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens
that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon
enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility
feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">But no more. For its fans and advocates in the
visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most
revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and
its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may
seem counter-intuitive -- but their impact is striking.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Watching Rios and Tatum navigate the world with
the aid of their iPhones is a lesson in the transformative and often
unpredictable impacts that technology has on our lives. After getting dressed,
they strap on their backpacks, canes in hand, and walk out the door. They can't
see the sign someone hung in the elevator, informing them the building is
switching to FIOS, but the minute they're outside the fact they can't see is a
minor detail. They use Sendero -- "an app made for the blind, by the blind,"
says Tatum -- an accessible GPS that announces the user's current street, city,
cross street, and nearby points of interest. What it's missing, adds Tatum, is a
feature that tells you which bus is arriving and what its next stop is. In the
meantime they walk a couple of blocks south to catch the M1 downtown.
</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Rios pulls out coins from her purse and pays the
driver. She tells the coins apart by their size and the ridges. Bills are
another story -- but there's an app for that. It's called the LookTel Money
Reader and with it you can scan the bill you're being handed, instead of
depending on the kindness of strangers. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Romeo Edmead, 32, who's been blind since the age
of two, is a prominent member of the blind community in New York, taking pride
in who he is and all that he can do. He's a guide at the Dialog in The Dark
exhibit, a writer for the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the blind, and an
athlete. But he hasn't caught up with the iProducts yet. "It's revolutionary in
all that it can do," admits Edmead. "Now, if I want to tell money, I have a
standalone device," he demonstrates its size with the palm of his hand. "It's a
kind of box you slide the bill into and it tells you what the bill is, but it
means carrying something extra. That's inconvenient." </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Tatum is what Edmead calls "a techie." She had a
previous, failed experience with the Android, which almost made her give up the
touch technology. Luckily, she kept her mind open enough to see how those around
her are adapting to the iPhone. "I started 'Info share' five years ago, where a
group for visually impaired people can share information. A young lady, Eliza,
got an iPhone, and she was entranced." The sales representatives at the Verizon
store, she says, were very nice and helped her set up her email account and sync
her contacts. They didn't know much besides that, and she had to teach them how
accessibility is turned on (through Settings.) "They all went 'Whoa!'," she
says. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Tatum and Rios happily volunteer to show off all
their iPhone can do. "See, I tap it," says Tatum, her iPhone stretched in front
of her, "and it started reading out what is on the screen." </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Blind people use their iPhones slightly
different than the sighted because, well, they can't see what they're tapping
on. So instead of pressing down and opening up an app, they can press anywhere
on the screen and hear where their finger is. If it's where they want to be,
they can double-tap to enter. If it isn't, they'll flick their finger to the
right, to the left, towards the top or the bottom, to navigate themselves. The
same for the simple "slide to unlock" command. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">"We use Audible and it reads for us books that
we download from audible.com," Tatum goes on. Each woman is in her respective
phone, sliding and flicking and taping, looking for apps. What makes an app
stick, they explain, is whether it's practical, accessible, fast, and easy to
use. Rios adds that she downloaded a hundred apps by now, but for the most part
she'll use an app once or twice and leave it. There are a few, like Sendero,
that they use every day. "There's also HeyTell, it's speech texting," explains
Tatum. She demonstrates, and manages fairly quickly to record a few words and
send them to Maria. Maria receives the message, opens it, and holds her phone to
her ear. It works. "There's Dragon Dictation, but that's half baked," says
Tatum. "You can speak to it and it turns it into a written text you can then
send over." There's also HopStop. "It's completely accessible, you put in your
destination and it tells you what trains to take and exactly how to get there."
</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Chalkias, Tatum's colleague, is not only an
iPhone advocate who breezes through the device faster than a baby with an iPad,
he also gives private lessons to people of all ages on how to use it. He has
found that people, young and old, who can use a computer, are familiar with the
desktop environment, and can type, have an easier transition to the touchscreen.
"The first thing I teach is the layout," he explains. "They have to understand
it's a grid, four by four [apps], they need to understand the dock, the status
bar, how to unlock the screen.It's a new language, it means moving from buttons
to no buttons, and it means relying completely on audio cues, so it takes time
to adjust. The name iPhone is misleading -- it's more of a computer than a
phone." </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Siri, the highly acclaimed feature of the iPhone
4S, isn't the answer to everyone's prayers, in his view. It's a nice shtick, but
it's not always compatible with the voice over feature. "She'll hear what you're
saying, explains Chalkias, "but either not respond or her answer will appear on
the screen and you'll still have to tap it to hear the response, so there are
still some glitches." </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Tatum and Rios mention that in the future they'd
like their device to describe to them what's on the street as they're walking
down -- Toys "R" Us or CVS. It would be great if the phone could vibrate anytime
they are close to one. There should be an app that inform thems of
construction sites: Even the accessible GPS apps don't mention those. They would
also like an app that reads out restaurant menus, and a navigation app that
works indoors. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">People like Nektarios Paisios, 30, are the ones
who can make those wishes come true. Paisios, a Computer Science student from
Cyprus, moved to New York four and half year ago to work on his dissertation. He
went blind at four years of age, and is working on a number of iPhone apps that
could potentially solve some of the blind community's problems with the device.
One of them is an indoor GPS. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">"One of the biggest concerns of the blind
community is finding their way around independently," he says. "You can find an
address, but what if you get someplace and you have nobody to help you find your
way around the building?" His solution, still in the works, will attempt to
sketch a map of the building based on previous routes taken within, and the
strength of the wireless signals bouncing from the different sources. It'll also
take into consideration the pace and number of steps a person takes from one
point to the next. If a blind person were to arrive to a hotel, he'd only need
to be shown to his room once. The iPhone will remember the way for him, and
navigate him back and forth from the room to the lobby. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Another app Paisios is working on is a more
elaborate form of VizWiz, the app that tells the person what color is the shirt
he is about to wear. For people like him who have no recollection of color
("yellow means ripe, because yellow bananas are ripe"), it doesn't mean much
that the shirt he is pointing to is green. He'd like a stylist app to tell him
what this green goes with, so he can know which color pants to put on. It'll
also be able to tell more intricate designs. "What if people want to be
fashionable?" he asks earnestly. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">Yet for all that technology has helped achieve,
many in the blind community fear it might result in illiteracy in the
generations to come. "I think the technology that's coming out right now
is wonderful," says Chalkias,"but I also think it's dumbing us down because it's
making everything so easy. I have a lot of teens who have speech technology and
they don't know how to spell, and it's horrifying to see that." Rios has
encountered the same problem. She is an administrative assistant at the music
school of Lighthouse International "an organization dedicated to overcoming
vision impairment," based in Manhattan, and a tutor at CCVIP who helps Maria
with teenagers. "Even now I come in contact with kids who can't spell," she
says. "Young adults don't read Braille because they have screen readers who read
for them." </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">"I definitely think there's benefits to this
technology" Chalkias says. ''But if it keeps getting easier we're just going to
be a society of idiots that can't do anything except tell our computers what to
do for us." </FONT></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>