BlindSquare vs Seeing Assistant Go

BlindSquare is pioneering accessible navigation both indoors and outdoors. Know where you are, know where you're going, travel with confidence. BlindSquare is a new solution that combines the latest technology to help the blind with their daily lives. It has been developed in collaboration with blind people and carefully field tested. You need either an iPhone or an iPad to get started. It also supports some additional accessories to enhance the experience. How does it work? BlindSquare uses GPS and the compass to locate you. It then gathers information about the surrounding environment from FourSquare. BlindSquare has some unique algorithms to decide what information is the most relevant and then speaks it to you with high quality speech synthesis. “What's the most popular café within 200 meters radius? Where is the post office or the library?” You can control BlindSquare also through voice commands. The Voice Command feature is a premium service requiring purchase of credits for continuous use. Voice Command Credits are available as an in-app purchase on the App Store. Using BlindSquare as a GPS solution: When you start the app, it will start telling you the interesting places and street crossings around you. By changing the radius, you can limit the area you are interested in. You can also search by search term or by category. You can select an interesting place from the search results and perform the following tasks: 1) Get contact info (address, phone number) 2) Open twitter feed or restaurant menu (if provided) 3) Make a phone call 4) Start tracking the place (BlindSquare will assist you by repeating the distance and the clock face direction) 5) Start your favourite navigator for turn-by-turn instructions (TomTom, Navigon or Apple Maps) BlindSquare is aware of when you travel by car, bus or train and starts to report interesting places in front of you (for example, the next stops) and street crossings when you are passing them. You can also save your own private places to iCloud so they will be found with your every device. Using BlindSquare as a Foursquare client: If you like to play Foursquare, you can do the following with BlindSquare: 1) Get a list of nearby FourSquare venues 2) When you are in a place, you can check in by shaking your device 3) Do a check in with commenting and twitter/facebook sharing 4) Correct the location of the place BlindSquare supports the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean (South Korea), Norwegian, Polish, Portugues, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. VoiceOver usage is supported but it also includes higher quality additional speech synthesis by Acapela Text-To-Speech from Acapela Group. Instructions in English: https://www.blindsquare.com/user-guide/ and https://www.blindsquare.com/faq/ Please note: This app retrieves data in real time from Foursquare and Open Street Map. Use of a flat rate data plan is highly recommended. Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life. Having only been released in May 2012, BlindSquare has already received several prizes and awards: - GSMA: Global Mobile Awards 2013, Best Mobile Health Product or Service - Apps4Finland 2012 - OpenCities App Challenge 2012 - The Finnish Information Processing Association: Best Product 2012 Please note: To use BlindSquare, your iCloud account has to be active so BlindSquare can access it to save your settings and places. Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.

The Seeing Assistant Go app supports the spatial orientation of blind and visually impaired people. It provides information about the surroundings using synthetic speech, sounds, evibrations and pointing in the direction of the top of the phone. Useful when travelling, but also for getting to know the area of unfamiliar places you are about to visit. - Are you travelling by bus and want to know which stop it has just stopped at or how far it is to the one you want to get off at? - Which streets is the taxi taking you down? - Where is the nearest grocery shop to the guesthouse where you are going to spend your holiday? - Is the beach really as close from there as the owner claims? - Which stop is closest to the address you are going to and what is the best route to get there? - Do you want to save places that are important to you in the app so you can easily return to them? Two app modes let you customise the app to your liking: - Basic mode for beginners, without unnecessary functions that you are not going to use anyway. - Advanced mode: a lot of settings and functions, without which it is difficult to imagine a meaningful navigation app for the blind. There are a few things to keep in mind to make using Seeing Assistant Go convenient and safe for you: - The app is not a replacement for a white cane or a guide dog. It is a supplement to these rehabilitation aids. - The information in the app comes from map data, not from observation of the terrain. It may inform about closed places and ignore others that have not yet been mapped. - The routes suggested by the application do not take into account local conditions, such as pavement repairs or other temporary obstacles and impediments on the road. As with our other applications in the Seeing Assistant family, we have also included the best of what we have in the Transition Technologies team in Go: - More than a decade of experience in creating innovative software for the blind. - An uncompromising approach to maximising the product’s accessibility for screen readers. - Openness to implementing users’ ideas: we cannot guarantee that we will implement all good ideas quickly, but we will certainly do it better than anyone else!