Home Tech These apps help people with disabilities travel smarter and safer

These apps help people with disabilities travel smarter and safer

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A google maps route

The site is similar to Wikipedia, where community members have access to make their own edits while visiting places and experiencing each place’s level of accessibility. Users can mark their finds with a green symbol indicating places that are fully wheelchair accessible; orange, meaning partially wheelchair accessible; or red, indicating that the place is not accessible. The accessibility of the bathrooms can also be rated. Sedan, Tokyoand Paris are hot spots for entries, but the site has grown to include users worldwide with 3.2 million bookmarked locations.

google maps

Google’s ubiquitous and free Maps platform offers quite a few accessibility features, such as wheelchair accessible route option for walking directions so you can get stair-free routes between locations. If you’re exploring shops, businesses, or museums, the wheelchair icon can help you find accessibility information. For example, Google can tell you if there is a step-free entrance, bathrooms, parking, or accessible seating.

Check the “Wheelchair accessible” box in Route Options in Google Maps to see the best directions for wheelchair use.

Courtesy of Google

For people with visual impairments, the Screen reader capabilities for Lens in Maps. It can give you auditory information about places around you, as well as useful information such as the name and category of a place and how far away it is. And, with Google Detailed voice guide feature available worldwide, you can also get spoken walking directions.

be my eyes

The mobile application be my eyes gives people who are blind or have low vision virtual access to sighted volunteers via video call. Volunteers give real-time descriptions of what they see through the phone’s camera. For example, a sample call shows a blind user asking for help identifying a red cardigan versus a black one. Currently, there are nearly 690,000 blind people and more than 7,600,000 volunteers registered on the platform.

If the user doesn’t want to connect with a live person, the app also offers an artificial intelligence feature called Be My AI that uses computer vision and an AI chatbot to describe what it sees in the photos it takes. Since the feature doesn’t rely on human volunteers, users can access the AI ​​at any time of the day or night, or when they just need a quick answer on something simple and don’t want to bother anyone.

The app is available on both. iOS and Android. “While people use Be My Eyes for many things, we know that travel assistance is an important use case,” says Mike Buckley, president and CEO. Buckley says the app can help book hotels and customers can use Be My AI. understand the buttons on a phone or the soap and shampoo bottles in the shower.

Features on your iPhone

Apple The products offer numerous accessibility features. For example, the iPhone’s Live Captions feature allows deaf and hard-of-hearing users to read real-time captions on their screen when talking to someone in person, on FaceTime, or on a phone call. sound recognition allows the user to program the phone to recognize specific sounds such as a doorbell, an alarm, or water running from a tap, and will alert the user with a vibration and notification. AND magnifying glass not only magnifies objects, signs and labels, but also includes detection modes. For example, Door Detection helps the user navigate to a door and tells them how to open it.

Other resources

In addition to these apps and websites, travel blogs like No Sidewalks with Cory Lee, Having a wheelchair will traveland just emma They are great places to find affordable travel tips. Applications like galapro allow deaf and hard of hearing patrons the opportunity to read subtitles on Broadway shows if they are not already offered. And many places like Yelp and Airbnb They are now incorporating accessibility into their platforms, thus making vacations much more accessible. So now even more people can join in the fun.

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