Leveling the playing field with apps

"Ariadne GPS offers you the possibility to know your position and to get information about the street, the number, etc. and explore the map of what’s around you. What do we mean by saying “explore”? You’ll deal with a talking map.

This app is completely accessible using voice over and gives you access to information that are normally unavailable to people using the speech synthesizer and can be therefore especially useful to blind and partially sighted people.

This app has the following main features:

> Telling you where you are;

> Letting you explore what’s around you;Letting you explore a specific zone;

> Periodically checking your position and telling where you are (by only telling the details changed since last check);

> Letting you add and list your favourite points;

> Alerting you when you are close to one of your favourite points."

Developed by the Rocheseter Human Computer Interaction, VizWiz is an iPhone (and now an iPad) application aimed at enabling blind people to recruit remote sighted workers to help them with visual problems in nearly real-time.

Users take a picture with their phone, speak a question, and then receive multiple spoken answers. VizWiz is used as a tool to explore human-backed access technology - the idea that access technology would be more reliable and useful if humans could back up fragile (but fast and cheap) automatic approaches. With services like Mechanical Turk, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and everyone connected at all times on their mobile devices -- the human cloud is ready and waiting; we just need to figure out how to harness them to do useful work!

Did I say, it is FREE!