[Nfbv-announce] Try BlindSquare for Free at NFB of Virginia Convention

[Tracy Soforenko]

Hi Virginia Federationists,

 

I am pleased to share that BlindSquare has offered a brief free trial of
their BlindSquare Event app for use at the National Federation of the Blind
(NFB) of Virginia Convention. The app will start working November 5. 

Instructions are provided below. Please note, it is best to download the app
when connected to a wifi network. While the hotel offers wifi, it is
probably best to do this at home.

 

Andrea Bodnari, an assistive technology specialist,  is assisting
BlindSquare and will be at the convention to provide more information.

 

----

 

BlindSquare Event is a free app that makes use of the latest features
available in smartphones to aid the blind and visually impaired during
special events held by blindness organizations. BlindSquare Event is
available for the iPhone and iPad in the App Store.

When you are at an event that has been registered with the developer of
BlindSquare Event and BlindSquare Event has determined your location using
your iOS-device’s GPS capabilities, it will look up information about your
surroundings on Foursquare and Open Street Map. Employing unique algorithms,
it will then ascertain the information most useful to you and speak it in a
clear synthetic voice.

You can use BlindSquare Event for example to find a café within a selected
radius or to locate the nearest post office or the library. Shake your
device to hear your current address, as well as information about the
location of the nearest street intersection and venues around you. Track
your destination, so BlindSquare Event will periodically announce the
distance and direction while you are traveling. Simulate locations to
explore their surroundings before you visit them. If you use BlindSquare
Event to mark your position, it can help you to find this spot again later.
BlindSquare Event possesses filters you can set, so you only hear the
information you currently need. Have BlindSquare Event announce streets and
saved places only, so you do not get overwhelmed by more information than
you need. If you mark your saved places and Foursquare venues as Favorites,
BlindSquare Event will always notify you when you reach them. Since
BlindSquare Event saves your favorites and your places to iCloud, they get
synched between all of your iOS-devices, and you can use BlindSquare Event
on all of them.

Although you will need VoiceOver to operate the app, BlindSquare Event uses
its own high quality Acapela voices in many different languages to announce
information about your environment. This means you will always hear all of
the information you need, even when you can’t touch the screen of your
device, you lock the screen, or you use another app while BlindSquare Event
is running in the background.

BlindSquare Event will start working two days before an event begins and
will stop working two days after the event has ended. Its use will be
limited to a radius of 43 miles or 70 kilometers around the location of the
event.

You can download BlindSquare Event from the App Store at
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bs-event/id635707709?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4>
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bs-event/id635707709?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

We recommend that you download and install BlindSquare Event while you have
access to a wifi network as the app is about 90 mb and when you launch it
for the first time, it will download an additional file to install its high
quality speech synthesizer. Since BlindSquare Event does not include offline
maps, you need an active internet connection while using it.

BlindSquare Event provides the same functionality as the paid version of
BlindSquare as long as it is used at the time and location of an event that
has been registered with the developer of BlindSquare and BlindSquare Event.
Therefore you may listen to this one-hour podcast about BlindSquare to learn
more about how to use BlindSquare Event
<http://www.applevis.com/sites/default/files/podcasts/AppleVisPodcast387.mp3
_.mp3>
http://www.applevis.com/sites/default/files/podcasts/AppleVisPodcast387.mp3_
.mp3 or read the BlindSquare FAQ at  <http://www.blindsquare.com/faq/>
http://www.blindsquare.com/faq/.

If you have any questions about BlindSquare event, feel free to write to
<mailto:support at blindsquare.com> support at blindsquare.com or tweet
@BlindSquareGPS.