When I was at the Summer Academy a couple of people mentioned they were navigating with an app called BlindSquare. They asked if I used it and I was almost sheepish to admit my vision is still good enough to navigate with plain old Google Maps. It is surprising how social norms change from place to place. I felt like being blinder would have given me more ‘street cred’, but what the hey, I got by.
BlindSquare appears to be the app VIPs (Visually Impaired Persons) in the know use to navigate. According to its advertising BlindSquare is the “world’s most popular accessible GPS-app developed for the blind and visually impaired.” It is said to describe the environment, announce points of interest and also alert you to street intersections as you travel.
The home page says BlindSquare is self-voicing and has a dedicated speech synthesizer, whatever that means. There is an audio menu that can be accessed with the buttons on the side of your phone. Seeing the screen is not required.
BlindSquare announces your progress towards your destination. It marks your spot (sounds like Beastie Baby!) and can lead you back should you want to return. The app opens with voice over. BlindSquare ‘understands’ a variety of languages. These include many of the most ‘popular’ European languages as well as some others like Finnish and Romanian. The farthest east they go looks to be Turkish. The farthest south they go looks like Arabic.
Reading the comments it seemed to me the developers of BlindSquare are awesome people. They responded in the affirmative to just about all of the suggestions and have been adding languages right along. Updates are added regularly.
Now for the bad news. BlindSquare is $40.00 in the App Store. There is a free version called Blindsq Event available in the App Store but it is seriously pared down from the for a fee version. The pay version featured three or four pages of options and Blindsq Event featured one. I would say what do you want for nothing, but my answer would be ‘the World!’ so I know better than to ask that question.
I just downloaded the free version and will play with it later. As always, I would love to have others’ opinions. Please download it and let us know what you think.
Those who have the pay BlindSquare, please chime in!
written August 2nd, 2017