Candle vs Seeing Assistant Go

Candle helps blind and visually impaired people find their way. The app is built for VoiceOver from the ground up: large buttons, clear announcements and vibration instead of looking at a map. COMPASS • Direction by vibration: Candle vibrates when you point your iPhone north or in one of the eight compass directions, and announces it. • Compass to a destination: hold the iPhone in front of you – Candle tells you the direction and distance to your destination. PLACES NEARBY • Explore: cafés, restaurants, pharmacies, ATMs, bus stops, taxi stands, hospitals, public toilets, pedestrian crossings and traffic lights with sound signals – sorted by distance while you walk. • Radar: point your iPhone in a direction and hear which places are there. • Wikipedia: articles about sights around you. YOUR PLACES AND ROUTES • Save favourite places – from your current position or by address search, also by voice. • Walking navigation to saved places, with announcements you choose: detailed or short. • Location notes: leave a hint at a spot, e.g. "stairs after the door" – when you pass it with Candle open, your iPhone vibrates and Candle tells you the hint. Add a new one quickly with a long press on the Candle icon. • Share places as a link and receive them from family and friends. PRIVACY No sign-up, no ads, no tracking. Your places and location notes stay on your device. For maps, places and routes Candle uses open services such as OpenStreetMap. OPEN SOURCE Candle is free and open source: github.com/freegroup/candle Found a bug or have an idea? We welcome feedback – especially from blind and visually impaired users.

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!