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2009-06-22-Accessible GPS

Seminars@Hadley

Accessible GPS Overview and Comparison

Presented by Michael May

Moderated by Dawn Turco

June 23, 2011

Dawn Turco Greetings again everyone, this is Dawn Turco. And today’s seminar is Accessible GPS Overview and Comparison. And let me first welcome everyone to today’s seminar and before introducing our speaker, I want to also announce that today is the first time Hadley has offered a seminar at Hadley for continuing education hours; so some of you who have registered for today’s seminar will be interested in taking the quiz and acquiring the certificate as documentation of having successfully the continuing education event today.

The quiz will become available approximately 15 minutes after the seminar is aired today, and for those of you taking that quiz, you are allowed two opportunities to pass the quiz with a grade of 70 or

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind of 84


better. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to have to re-register and go through the fee and process again.

You have seven days from the failed attempt to go ahead and try again, but once you have passed, a certificate will be issued electronically only, and it will be in pdf format, and you will do that after the quiz, and we ask that you just complete a short survey to give us feedback on the seminar for credit.

If you did not register for credit today, but are interested in doing so, you certainly can go back and do that at a later time, either today or when the seminar recording is posted; and we typically get those up on our past seminars page within about 48 hours of the event. So if you want to pass the word on to others, that this opportunity is there for them, the past seminars page would be the place to go for a list of approved seminars for continuing education hours.

Today’s is for two continuing education hours, and for those of you who are interested it is ACVREP approved. That’s important because I wanted to let you know that today’s topic was the number one choice of topics that we took from a nationwide survey that we did with O&M specialists. When asked what



topics are they most interested, and what would most meet their continuing education needs, GPS led the list.

So that brings us to Accessible GPS Overview and Comparison with today’s speaker. And today’s speaker is Michael May. Michael May joins us today from the Sendero Group and will be presenting on all things GPS, what are the strengths and weaknesses of GPS, the differences between the various systems and how to best integrate GPS into the way finding equation.

And I am going to, like you, sit back and listen to today’s presentation and wait for an opportunity for questions. In the meantime, I am handing the microphone over to Mike May; Mike, welcome so much and thank you for today’s presentation.

Michael MayDawn, it’s great to be here. Having lots of experience with these chat sessions, I may lock down the “talk” key to give myself hands free from time to time, but I’ll also let up just briefly, so that somebody can jump in and say we’re not hearing you, or you’re distorted, or whatever is going on. But hopefully we won’t have to deal with too much of that, just depending on our internet connection.



It’s great to have such an incredible turnout, I think of the trouble that it takes to fly places to many way finding seminars over the years, and I fly some place, stay a couple nights in a hotel and probably don’t get 40, 50 participants in person. So it’s an amazing advancement in technology and I applaud Hadley for being on the forefront here, not only in terms of the technology, but getting the word out, because that’s half the battle to make sure that people are aware of the opportunity.

A bit more about my background in terms of GPS, I’m going to go through some of the preliminary stuff here pretty quickly, assuming that most people know it. I’ve been working on GPS since 1994 and initially with Arkenstone, and then starting Sendero Group in 2000 along with some other blind folks.

I’ve been teaching seminars as a visiting professor, a visiting scholar at Western Michigan University a couple times. I’ve taught these seminars around the world, and most importantly done a lot of individual training of groups and of individuals, so you learn a lot more when you’re one on one, and you get feedback from people as far as what they’re understanding, what’s valuable to them in terms of what they need to learn about GPS; so that’s been real useful. And a



big part of how the GPS technology has evolved comes from direct input from user.

I’ve just started with Atlas Talking Map Program at Arkenstone in 1995, and the first year that was launched, we had a 45-city tour and went around and did in-person demonstrations of that technology at agencies all over the country, probably one or two of you might have been present for those. So the technology has evolved a long way.

In my earlier seminars, I used to have to explain what GPS was, that may be on your quiz, so I’ll just tell you briefly and assume that you know, or you’ll ask if you don’t know any technicalities about the GPS itself.

The main thing to know is that it primarily works outside, it can work inside with some of the newer receivers that are getting more and more sensitive, but you don’t count on that, you certainly don’t tell your students or clients that it will work inside. If it does, it’s an extra bonus, but assume that it doesn’t.

There are 24 satellites at least that are circumnavigating the earth, so you get up to 12, I’ve never seen 12, but a few people have told me they’ve seen on their receivers, it will announce how many satellites you’re getting; if you’re getting 10 or 11,



you’re doing pretty well. You need three or four, really three minimum to get any kind of position fix, triangulation, or as it’s really technically called, trilateration.

I was talking about the background of GPS, and where things have come, where they are today, and the satellites and GPS positioning itself. As I said you can count on it working outside, you can get up to 12 satellites, you need at least three or four to get a decent position fix. What I’m going to talk to you about in terms of this GPS accuracy, map data accuracy and some of the other components are really the things that you need to know more than the individual commands on a particular product.

You may want to learn the product if you have access to it, that’s great, but the priority really is that you convey the basic concepts to a student and they can then learn the individual commands and so forth. They can be the expert on the unit itself. It’s your job, if you’re an O&M instructor to guide them through safe use of the GPS to learn it in a fashion, in a systematic way that promotes them to getting over the frustrating initial period and to the point where it’s actually useful.



I’m thinking of my own experience in this learning curve that I went through this weekend just to give you a little bit of a comparison, and you might have something in your background that you can think of when you’re learning a new piece of technology. Learning the new touch screen on the iPhone, for me it was both exhilarating and frustrating, and I think this is what you’re going to face in teaching people with GPS.

There are ah-ha moments when somebody discovers something they didn’t know was in their own neighborhood before that are really powerful and that person developing the motivation to get through the frustration part. In the case of the iPhone, it’s for the first time as of Friday, it has a touch screen interface, and I mention this because it also might be relevant at some point for a blind person, it’s a way’s off, but it’s a start in terms of a different kind of user interface than we’re used to with keypads.

The way it works on a touch screen is you move your finger around whatever is under that finger speaks, so if you’re over contacts, or GPS or calendar it says calendar, you hold your finger on that item and then you tap the screen with a separate finger and it’s like clicking on it, and it launches that thing. That part is very cool.



The frustrating part is when you try to enter letters, so you run your finger over the screen and you’re doing the equivalent of hunt and peck, and then you tap the screen, you enter the letter, and if you make mistake, you’ve got to backspace, there’s all this stuff, and as I went through it, I thought this is probably what people experience when they first are learning GPS, there is so much information, there is so much location information that they aren’t used to with this brand new rubric, it’s often a challenge for people. Some people get it quicker than other people.

But I’m telling you this because the main, one of the most valuable things you can do is get people turned on to the technology. That’s really your job. Get them fired up.

Talk about situations where it’s really useful, in fact, it’s really useful to everybody. A lot of people think who is the GPS for; oh, it’s for super travelers. My feeling really is that it’s for weaker travelers, because super travelers will find a way to get there no matter what, we all know people like that. But what about the people who are directionally challenged, blind or sighted, this is where GPS really comes into a valuable place in one of the tools in our bags of tricks.



If you haven’t had a chance to see it, check out a video that we put together, it’s on the Sendero Group website that talks exactly about this idea and does it in kind of a fun way in terms of the tools in our bag of tricks. And in that tool you’ll see images of a dog flying out of the toolbox, a cane, and then of course some GPS devices. But these are all tools that we use and the better we use the tools, the better we get around and take advantage of the information.

It’s always important, I assume people know this, but it’s important to point out to you and to your students that GPS is for orientation, it’s not for mobility. Don’t even think about using it without a cane or a dog. Those are mobility devices that determine what’s in front of you.

The GPS might be able to tell you, if you’ve put it into the database, that’s there a tree with an overhang coming up, but it’s not for that purpose. It’s not for telling you where there’s a curb or a hole or a person, or anything to do with obstacles. And that’s important to get across to people up front.

It’s just like when you get a dog guide, some people think well I’m just going to sleep now and let the dog do the driving. We all know that isn’t true, it doesn’t work with a dog, it doesn’t work with GPS, you’ve got



to pay attention, and it’s up to the user to take advantage of the technology.

Going beyond what is GPS, which is ubiquitous worldwide, there’s no charge for it, it’s really an amazing system in terms of the technology. There have been a few other systems talked about being implemented and one in the former Soviet Union, one in Europe, those have lost funding or lost momentum, and the US based GPS system is really the one being used worldwide and although legally, technically, the military can shut down the GPS, there’s so much use of it for commercial and for consumer applications, it’s highly unlikely that would happen. It didn’t happen even over 9/11; it’s not likely to happen under any other circumstance either.

In terms of getting back for a second to this idea of the value of GPS and the location information, and this is something that you want to think about, because it could come up in a test, it’s something you really know, location information is on par with reading literacy. In fact, I’ve proposed just such a topic on the literacy conference in the fall.

We always hear about reading literacy and Braille literacy, location literacy is equally important and this takes a number of different formats, knowing how



things are spelled, if you’ve never seen a sign, you might think it’s simple, but it’s important to know how things are spelled because it conveys a professional, an intelligent image about somebody if they know how to spell something or if they don’t.

Is it critical to know that Krispy Kreme donuts are spelled with “Ks”? Maybe not, but it’s symbolic of knowing the bigger picture as far as how a lot of things are spelled, towns, different businesses and so forth. So that location literacy is important from that standpoint, but more important from the standpoint of being able to walk down a street and know what your options are, know what your choices are.

All the GPS systems that we’re going to talk about today do this in different fashions, they have different user interfaces, but the basic concept is the same. You’re getting the information that’s relative to your particular location, it could be 10 feet away, it could be a mile away, but it’s relative to your location. And that’s why we call it location literacy. Knowing about your environment gives you options.

I’d made a case that in fact location literacy is important in terms of job hunting, if there is any rehabilitation counselors in this group, sometimes it comes to your attention that is justifiable as a tool



that’s necessary for a job, a scanner is, a screen reader is, what about GPS, and some counselors will say well, no, it’s not really important, because the person can get to work, we’ll have an O&M instructor show them how to get to work and home, and that’s all they need to know.

It’s important because of choices and knowing what other businesses are around, finding a home that’s near transportation, a job that’s near transportation, that’s near a grocery store, all of these location items go into a productive and happy job situation, and they also give you the opportunity to find a new job, to develop an understanding of your environment, and what other companies are around, and doing this whole location search when you’re trying to get a job and navigate in that new environment is very important and GPS is a tool for doing that. It’s not just – it used to be thought of just as a device to get you from Point A to Point B, but that’s not all there is to it.

I think of GPS with two different components; one is this idea of just get me to where I’m going, I don’t care what’s in between because I’m sleeping, or I’m listening to a book or whatever, and that might be something that’s the case one day. Another day you might just be more in a strolling mode, and so there’s what we call look around capabilities.



Now, this is important because some of the GPS devices are really geared more for get me from Point A to Point Z, and they don’t focus so much on location information. Other devices use the location information or what we call look around capabilities, and I’m going to pause for just a second here, and see I can – my computer has rebooted so give me a minute to see if I can get back in directly.

Dawn TurcoThank you Mike. Mike is rejoining the room, and I’m keeping him on the phone temporarily, but we’re going to hope his mic will be able to continue through the seminar room; let’s give it a go Mike, I’m releasing the microphone just in case you can pick it up.

Michael MayIt’s always important to have back-up and that’s true with GPS as well, you know batteries run out, sometimes the data is not as accurate as we would like, there’s all those things so no O&M person is out of a job yet. This is a long way from being that accurate, so we’d like to have it as an augmentation to people’s skills and other capabilities, but it’s not the only tool in the toolbox for sure.



So we’re talking about the importance of this information which you get with it in the value and this value additive is so important to tell the user, so they can get over the hump. One of the interesting things that I think you should also convey to people is the power of getting lost, and that may seem a little bit odd, but I’ve long promoted the idea that GPS is more valuable for helping you get un-lost, and that it necessarily is getting you from one point to another point.

What it really does is it allows you to go exploring and there’s an important component that makes that more fun if somebody can possibly get this into their psyche, it’s the idea of solving a puzzle. If you get lost, you get to solve a puzzle to get un-lost. If you don’t get lost, it’s not as much fun.

Now, this depends on whether you really need to be somewhere on time, if it’s a safe neighborhood, there’s a lot of practical components to this. But most people use common sense and they’ll get themselves lost, or go exploring, if you prefer, when it’s appropriate, not when it’s inappropriate. So this puzzle-solving aspect of GPS is really amazing.

As people become more familiar with the technology, they start finding ways to explore. And at the very



least, and this is one of the things that people learn right in 1A, when you first start learning to use GPS, this is a component of it that’s been tested at Western Michigan University, for example, and believe it or not there haven’t been many studies that actually validate that GPS is beneficial, versus no GPS.

At Western, they did this in a couple of different scenarios and one was just the idea of have a 2,500 foot circle in the middle of the field and send somebody out to find it. This is, we refer to it often as the getting warmer technique. So you’re getting nudged one way or the other, if you know that your destination is at 11 o’clock, or heading to the left, then you turn a little bit that direction, you get your destination to be at 12 o’clock, straight ahead, you walk to it, maybe you overshoot it and come back.

But the one thing to be aware of with any GPS system is if the destination distance is descending, that’s good, that’s what you want to – you want to understand, you want to hear, you want to convey it to any student.

There is a lot of information that can be flying at you, but if you focus on one piece, then you can get that piece down, before you start worrying about the location information and what points of interest are



nearby and the rest of it. You just want to know that your destination is getting closer, if indeed that’s what you want.

So you can read those studies certainly as you can imagine, they did validate, I think it was in JVIB there was a couple of articles that Paul [Bocelli] wrote along with his team that validated the GPS in fact was better in that setting, as well as in the setting of being turned loose in neighborhoods and finding their way to a specific house address, with and without GPS, seems like a no-brainer, but it’s great to have a university study that actually does this in a methodical way and shows us all that it is valid.

Now, to the meat of this presentation, and I will stop and take questions, you might want to jot some down as you go along, because I’ll go through a number of different subjects, and you’re welcome to come back to one that I didn’t explain entirely, but I’ll try to cover quite a bit of ground first, and then take questions, because I may answer some of your questions first.

Not one size fits all, and this is the beauty of where GPS is today versus where it was in the year 2000. We now have approximately six, and I say approximately, because not all the systems are full-fledged GPS orientation systems. Some of them are



pretty basic, so I’m not really sure whether you count those or not. I am counting them so we’re six or depending on how you slice it, maybe seven systems.

But the good news is there are options. To figure out which system is appropriate, we look at a number of different things, and I’m going to go through what some of those things are, and then we’ll get to the individual technologies, and we’ll come back to these evaluation parameters so that you can then hopefully apply them in your situation with your client, with that particular client’s budget and mobility orientation needs in mind.

Now here are some of the parameters that we want to look at. I caution people to be careful where they set the bar, and this goes back to the idea that GPS is only for super travelers. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about that, if somebody has really awful mobility, it doesn’t mean that GPS isn’t appropriate for them.

There are people who use GPS only in a car, they never get out and walk around with it. Walking down the street using a cane or a dog with GPS is the most advanced thing that you can do with it. There are plenty of people who only use it in a car or in a bus. There are people who only use it in the virtual



exploration mode. It’s just on a desktop in their office or home, and they explore their environment virtually with the GPS system. They’re really not using the GPS, they’re using the map component of it, but they only explore.

And most people start out and work their way through these different steps, so they might start out only being an exploring, virtual mode person, then pretty soon they’re using it in the car or a bus, and then they develop confidence enough to go out and about on their own.

Some people just blaze right through that sequence and they’re out and about using the unit within a couple of hours, and I’ve taught all types. But I love the image of the old conjure who is retired and now is losing vision and loses his drivers’ license, and he was planning for a lifetime to drive around in a motorhome with his wife, and visit the country, and they’ve sold their house, and now they’ve got this motorhome and what’s he going to do, sit in the passenger seat or go in the back and go to sleep.

In fact, he’s now the co-pilot, he’s the one figuring out which RV park is in the next town, or where are they going to stop for a place to eat, what recreational entertainment items are around, fishing, tourist



attractions whatever, all of that can be done from that co-pilot seat, and when they get where they’re going, he’s probably not going to take the GPS with him to march around the RV park, but he helped get them there and have a sense of dignity that’s come back just from using the GPS in that situation.

So be aware of where you’re setting the bar for somebody, set it appropriately for where they are now, but assume that that bar can be raised later on.

The input and output and the user interface, this is what distinguishes the various units quite a bit. Well you can think well there’s seven GPS systems out there, my gosh how am I going to know which system to use. Well, it’s often made easy by virtue of what the particular user already has in their possession. A lot of students have BrailleNotes and Voice Notes that they’ve gotten for academic purposes. If somebody already has a BrailleNote, there’s only one system for the BrailleNote, that’s the one they’re going to get.

Now, some people might say well, I want to get the Trekker Breeze because I could use even if I did have BrailleNote, and that’s an option and some people have done that. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense because you already have the BrailleNote, but they say well I don’t take that around with me, that’s a



32 cell in power, it weighs three pounds, I just want to leave it in the house, and when I go out walking, I’ll want to bring the little unit.

Okay, well that’s a trade-off that they’ve evaluated, this is part of the decision making that you’re involved in to help somebody know what their options are. And as we all know with adaptive technology, or really with any person, it could be a television or a DVD player, it’s about trade-offs, price versus size, size versus complexity, number of features you might want, all of that’s part of the equation, the trade-off equation.

So here’s one of the things that you have to decide is portability versus power, because normally you don’t get everything, in an ideal world you might but in the real world you trade off, usually if you have a smaller device or a cheaper device, you don’t also get all the productivity that you would and the power of let’s say the more expensive unit.

The input and output choices are the following. You have for input, you have either a keypad or a keyboard, and then on a keypad it’s usually a telephone keypad or in the case of the Trekker, it has its own kind of keypad that the Trekker Breeze and then the Trekker Classic has about a 33 key



keyboard, its own unique board, so you have that kind of user interface, and within the PDA devices like the BrailleNote, the PAC Mate and the Braille Sense, they have Braille keyboards, some of them have qwerty keyboards, so if somebody, like a lot of blinded veterans, obviously lost their sight later in life and may not be particularly good in terms of using Braille for reading or writing, and therefore they’d get a qwerty device, probably one without a Braille display, because Braille displays are expensive.

So that user interface is the first thing to evaluate with somebody. If they want a qwerty device then it rules out some of the devices, the Voice Sense for example from GW Micro is really nice and attractive, because it’s little, it’s about the littlest of the PDA devices out there, and so little is good. I think in a device that you’re going to be carrying around with you, if you’re a person that’s actually going to have it with you, portability and size is really important, both for GPS as well as for all the other information that might reside on that unit, your phone number, your calendar, everything you need in a portable information situation. But with GPS it’s particularly important. So the Voice Sense is great, but it only has a Braille keyboard.



One of the beauties of a Braille keyboard is that they don’t take up a lot of space, it’s a real advantage for blind people because we have this code we’ve learned and it allows us to have a small keyboard, which means a small footprint for a device. A qwerty keyboard by definition of having all those keys takes up more space.

Now you get people trying to cram them into a smaller space on phones and like on the iPhone, but they’re not big enough where you could put your finger side by side in a home row position. You’re really then moving to a hunt and peck interface, which is a lot different. If you use something like a Moto Q or any of these phones, PDA devices that have slide out keyboards or qwerty keyboards only, it’s a bit hard to orient on those, it takes some getting used to. But that particular interface situation is what will be an important factor when the person is evaluating which unit should I get, which brand, who offers the qwerty keyboard; if that’s in fact your primary choice. Some people can go either way, they can go with Braille or qwerty, and so then they have all the options on the table.

The keypad interface, okay, well the keypad means small, that’s the beauty of it, so you get a phone that just has a standard 12-key keypad and it’s really easy



to orient, everybody knows how to use it, that’s really wonderful. But it also means that if you’re entering letters you have to use a tap, two or three tap system for text messaging, in some situations you can use predictive text, but by and large even if you’re pretty efficient texter with the triple tap system, you’re not likely to be as quick as somebody that’s tapping on a full keyboard, either a Braille keyboard or a qwerty keyboard.

Does it matter in a GPS environment? Well you’re not writing a dissertation, you’re entering the point of interest name at most, but just to give you an example, if you wanted to search for a Starbucks on the Braille note, on a Braille keyboard, it would take you 12 key strokes, and that includes the key that you hit for find, then type in Starbucks and grade two, and you hit enter; so find, Starbucks, enter, that’s 12 keystrokes.

If you want to do that on the Trekker Classic it takes, oh, I forget what the number is, over 30, maybe 40 keystrokes, just because you’ve having to tap in a lot more information in order to get those same letters entered. So probably you’d do if you were a Trekker user, you’d say well, I’m just going to scroll through the – I’m going to pick the category, add coffee, restaurant, coffee and go through it that way, find out



what the nearest coffee place is, I don’t care if it’s Starbucks or not, or you’re likely to run across a Starbucks anyway, or who knows just forget the technology and use your nose.

So that’s all part of the interface question though. You can assume, generally speaking that a full keyboard allows you a more productive, quicker mechanism for entering data, for doing searches than a keypad system would, but both allow you to do it, just in a slightly less efficient mechanism in terms of a notepad.

And some people may ask about what about voice input, and I’ll dispel that myth right off the bat, by saying it’s terrible in an outdoor environment with noise, and with people talking to you, it’s been the Holy Grail for years. I worked in Bank of California. In 1981, we were trying to implement voice input for some different systems, and it was supposed to be the Holy Grail then and it wasn’t then and still isn’t now.

There’s some great products if you’re a slow typer, and you want to use Dragon in a quiet environment that’s one thing, some of the phone systems are getting pretty good in terms of pulling up contacts on your phone, that’s a little different, because you have



a defined list of items that you’re looking for, it’s a lot harder on a GPS.

There is a system in France called Kapten, K-A-P-T-E-N, that is doing it pretty effectively. So I may have to eat my words eventually, but I can say that this has been coming forever, and it’s just always a hair away from being practical and real. What I find challenging about voice input in any situation, just coming over here to the office this morning, I’m calling up information, and now they ask you city and state, and you say it, and then you say the manufacturer, or the business you’re looking for, and then they search it, then they start asking me some questions about do you want to text me this information, and then my wife starts talking to me and I’m saying be quiet, and the thing says you want me to always send you text messages? I go, no, not you.

You just want to throw the thing down on the ground, because you can’t instantaneously quiet the voice input system. If you had a system with a button on it, perhaps it would allow you to mute it a little bit more effectively, but my experience has been, there’s a lot more frustration with voice input than there is help in noisy environments. If it’s difficult to type in, then maybe voice input is better. It is being used in a limited sense in some of the accessible GPS devices,



but I wouldn’t count on that as being the system that you would be choosing based on voice input.

In terms of the user interface output there are also some things to consider here. A Braille display is absolutely fantastic for location information, if you can afford it, and that’s a big if, when you consider that a voice only device might be $2,000 and Braille is going to cost you $4,000, or $5,000 or $6,000, two to three times as much because of that Braille display.

It’s worth it, I love having Braille when I’m walking around for a couple reasons, in a noisy environment, if you don’t quite hear something right, you just drop your fingers onto the Braille display and you see what it says. I think for the literacy reason, it’s cool, because if you hear Krispy Kreme through a speaker, if you’re a voice only user, you’re not going to know that it’s spelled with “K”, so the literacy comes with having a Braille display.

And finally, it uses a different modality. I can have my hands on a Braille display in the car, talking to my wife, carrying on a conversation, and in the back of my mind is this channel that’s running that’s observing through the Braille display the information about the businesses that I’m passing. I can talk and read at the same time, but to try to have an ear phone in, and



listen and talk at the same time, makes you sound – you know how that makes you sound kind of drunk, delayed reaction in your speech, and then you start thinking that like you heard something that you didn’t really hear, because you heard about a business that all of a sudden caught your attention and you forgot what the person next to you was saying. Braille is great for the different modality, for the literacy and for the noisy environment. It’s not good in terms of the price.

So those are user interface input and output considerations that will come back to you as we look at each one of the different devices. One other thing to consider in evaluating devices is what other applications are important.

A few people get a GPS just for GPS sake, some people, and if you’re getting one in your car, maybe you get a Garmin Nuvee, or a Magellan Roadmate or one of those, and that’s really just for GPS purposes, although a lot of those devices have more capabilities than just GPS, they allow you to hook up your Bluetooth phone in your car, they allow you to take voice memos and other things, but in the accessible devices or the six or seven that we’re going to talk about, consider what the other applications of importance are, particularly the ones that are useful



for traveling around for portable information, that would be your calendar, your address book and phone, information, you need that when you’re out and about, you might need word processing, internet, email.

So the PDA devices have all of that stuff, if you’re going to be doing email on the road, or if you’re sitting in a bus stop and this is when you’re going to – we, who use public transportation, spend a lot of time hanging around waiting for buses to show up, and when we get on buses and trains and so forth. So having the ability to get access to email during those times is very, very useful, and the applications on the different PDAs facilitate that. So a GPS is one of the things that you want to be doing, but you’ll be doing email but make sure the device you’re getting has email on it as well.

And then there’s the portability factor. So I’ve alluded to that a little bit and the keyboard interface will impact how small the device is, how much does it weigh, a lot of times you have this trade-off, I’ve seen students that have a big PDA, like a BrailleNote Mpower or a PAC Mate and they weigh three pounds and the kid hardly weighs any more than the device does, it’s not really wonderful for them to schlep this thing around and to feel excited about GPS versus if



they had a smaller PDA like Voice Sense or the BrailleNote PK or a phone or a Breeze or one of the other smaller devices, so you want to think about that portability factor with regard to GPS.

Content. None of this positioning technology would be worth darn without good content. And the beauty of content is that it’s getting better all the time, and content refers to the map data which is typically licensed from a couple of different companies, Tele Atlas or Navteq are the two primary providers of map data to all companies.

So whether it’s Sendero or MapQuest or Google, these guys are licensing the data content all from the same providers. They can augment it in some different ways, like with the Google in terms of Google Maps, Google Earth, and with photos and so forth, but the core data is coming from these map companies.

The point of interest content is something else that varies quite a bit, the map data doesn’t vary from device to device, but the point of interest content does, for a couple of reasons. Although two different companies might license data from Tele Atlas, the same company, the same license, there is more expense to having all of the point of interest data licensed, versus let’s say just having the travel data.



This is what most companies are interested in, restaurants, hotels, museums, entertainment venues. They don’t care about other categories beauty salons, chiropractors and all of this.

So the point of interest data can vary from one unit being 2 million points for the US to being 15 million points of interest. The quality of the content, this is something that always needs improvement, businesses go away and they’re still in the database, or they move, or there are some that aren’t in there that should be there, new subdivisions get put in, and they aren’t in there in the map data.

With any map, as soon as it’s published, whether it’s in print or electronically, it’s outdated as soon as it’s published. So there is a lag there, but these companies are very viable and they have huge resources being applied to improving the content, and it’s getting better and better.

There are also some peripheral types of content which I think are quite exciting and they are starting to change the landscape. We have worked for many years trying to get transit stop data from different cities, and it’s really hard to work one city at a time. So we started out with Charlotte, North Carolina, and got 5,000, 6,000 bus stop data points that we put into



the BrailleNote GPS, and then we got Portland, 8,500 transit stops. And a few other cities, Madison, Austin and so that’s maybe one a year, because it was a lot of work to organize this.

There is nothing financial in it for the, or for us, it was just a really valuable thing to have when you had it. It’s incredible to be able to go along in Portland, hear the bus stop, all the buses are stopped there, the bus numbers, you can find out if a bus stop has a bench, or if it just has a pole, if it’s on the backside of the sidewalk or the front, is there a phone booth nearby. There is about 50 data points for each stop, and Portland is the most amazing to me.

But what’s happening now is that Google has a data site for transit companies to contribute their data to, and they all use the same format. And this was the problem before there wasn’t a constant format, so we were always importing and modifying data to try to get it in a sensible fashion. Now Google has that set up and there is I think about 30 or 40 transit companies already plugged into Google, and that’s data that needs to be added to these accessible devices, it hasn’t been but it’s so valuable to blind people to have that content.



Talking ATMs, how much money has gone into ATMs being placed around the country, millions of dollars. How many blind people use them? Well, they aren’t much use if you can’t find them. You talk to the people who really fought for talking ATMs to be implemented and they all talk about how discouraged they are that this incredible breakthrough that they helped bring about isn’t being taken advantage of by blind folks.

Seeing that dilemma I saw the obvious solution which was to get those talking ATM locations into the GPS database. And so we did that a number of years ago with Bank of America, Union Bank of California, Wachovia, a couple of others, but there’s a lot more banks where we didn’t have the talking ATM data, and you have to get it updated.

But beauty was you could just go into your system, and say where is the nearest talking ATM and I might be willing to walk four blocks to get to a talking ATM if I know it’s there, but there’s no way to just search around randomly, or if you went on a website, you could probably find it ahead of time, but you don’t always know that you want to do this – you don’t know the area that you’re in, or you don’t have access to a computer. So this is another form of data that’s important.



And then finally there is a user-generative content. And I’m very excited about the possibilities of this. There are a couple of companies that are using user-generated content in different fashions, Sendero has been doing this for a number of years and we have just plugged in by individual users something like 11,000 points of interest that have been contributed one by one and then there’s a lot of other databases that get imported into that, that are public domain; government databases that anybody can import but they might not know about them, or they don’t know how to import them, so that kind of open source user-content is really valuable.

And we hope to see that that catches on so all of these devices allow users to augment their location in a way that will make everything more valuable. I’d like to know where every restaurant is that has a Braille menu, if you are a wheelchair user, you’d sure like to know where every ramp was, every curb cut, where elevators are, a lot of transit stations there are some where finding the elevator can be really difficult.

This is all data that should and can be and in some cases is being collected, and we at Sendero continue to apply for grants to try to get this funded, if we could get some decent funding, work team up with Google



and Tele Atlas and a few others I think together we could make this happen, so the users can augment their environment in much the same way that you see the Zagat ratings for restaurants or electronics, you see reviews, Amazon as their mechanism for adding reviews of books and suggesting other books that are like the books that you like, all of that stuff is all user-generated content, and in the location environment.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have that in terms of some of the accessibility items but also in terms of you know this has a Braille menu but the restaurant sucks, well, we’d want to know that. Or it’s really loud, I would love to have a loudness rating on a restaurant, I think that would be the first thing, I would just set my filter to say don’t give me a restaurant that has a bad rating in terms of loudness; user-generated content and other forms of content. So remember that.

There’s another thing that’s important that differentiates the systems; the automatic triggering of information. So we have all of this data, we have the maps, we’ve got GPS position, now how is that information presented to the user? There are three things that people typically use to convey information; the distance to an item, the name of the item, and the direction to the item. Distance, direction and name, three things.



It sounds confusing when you first start and you hear something being announced at the intersection, being announced in terms of those three things, but once you get used to it and this be synthesizer or whatever, then it starts operating in the back of your mind, and not to be such a struggle; but it’s a little challenging in the beginning to hear those three things.

That’s why I said earlier you might want to just focus on one thing, like the distance, but not the directions, you’re not too worried about the name, because you hear that once. So the automatic announcing of this means that we’re really dealing with the fundamental thing unique to blind people, and that is that one hand is tied up with dog or a cane, or maybe holding onto a person, but one hand is for mobility, the other hand is for whatever, carrying, reading, waving, so you have one free hand which means this impacts a number of different things, what kind of user-interface do you have, keyboard, do you want to be pushing buttons or not.

If you can minimize the button pushing, that is an obvious improvement, and some of the systems do a better job of anticipating what the user wants to hear than other systems do. We call that look around mode.



And then we have the explore mode. Explore is the capability to look at something virtually, and there are different ways of doing that with your keyboard, with arrow keys, but the concept is, I’m going to go to Winnetka, Illinois and I’ve never been there before, I want to find a hotel that’s near Hadley and so how do I do that.

Well, I put myself virtually at Hadley, I do a search virtually from that position in the hotel category and I get a list. And I see how far they are, then I see one that I like, I say well, I’m a Marriott member, so I’m going to pick the nearest Marriott, but I want to see what’s around the Marriott. And I put myself virtually at the Marriott, and I do a search for nearby restaurants or coffee shops or pubs, because if it’s a Courtyard Marriott or the like, it might be next to a freeway on ramp and you can’t walk anywhere, it’s just self-contained and I might want to go exploring a little bit.

So you see how virtually I can look at my environment, find out how hard it is to get around, what freeways are nearby, do I want to be near a freeway, do I want to be in the middle of town? You can even do a search and I’ve done this just for fun to compare what kind of city is this.



So I’m going to search in the bar category from where I am, and I see within five miles there are 27 bars, and then you do a search just for the heck of it in the church category, and that’s actually called the place of worship category, and depending on where you are in the country, there will definitely be more churches than bars guaranteed, but sometimes there’s twice as many – sometimes there’s five times as many, it’s amazing in some places, how many items come up under the place of worship, and this is every phase, anything that’s categorized that way. It’s amazing how many churches are out there, more some places than others, but anyway depending on what you want to do, go to church or go to a bar, this is a way that you can evaluate your surroundings virtually.

The other component to your environment is being able to explore intersection by intersection. If you can paint a mental map of a place that might mean that you don’t even need to bring the GPS with you to begin with. So I can learn how long the blocks are, I can learn what kind of street it is, is it a highway, a main artery, what businesses are near the places that I’m cruising around, so what I’m doing is hitting the arrow key, up arrow to go one block forward, right arrow to turn right, up arrow to go another block, and it’s going to tell me 327 feet, it’s important to know if



it’s a 300 foot block, or a 3,000 foot block, it makes a big difference when somebody says oh, it’s just five blocks down the way.

So the exploration mode is not on all the devices, it’s an extremely valuable and under-rated component of GPS, because you can do it without your mobility device being involved, you can concentrate, you can put headphones on, there is no danger. You can review things, have them spelled, it’s just so much easier to have an understanding of where things are, before you head out the door, whether or not you bring the GPS with you, the explore mode is super-important.

GPS receiver sensitivity, this varies a little bit from device to device, but the devices that have the chip built in are probably going to be fine when they first come out, after they’ve been out for a few years, then that same chip that is being used, because the manufacturers can’t be changing it every day, so you see this in devices in most phones, this is the case, the phones have built-in GPS, but all tend to be the older surf three chip set, they work fine, but they’re not as sensitive as the latest technology.

The Breeze uses the same thing, it’s a device this is a trade-off again, if you get a device with built-in GPS



it’s convenient, because it’s in one box, but it’s not as sensitive or powerful if you lose your position someplace, it’s all for naught. An external GPS receiver means that you can buy the latest and greatest receiver and typically a new generation of receiver or chip set comes out about once a year or so, and they’re pretty amazing the latest unit that – we liked this one called the I-Blue, and you can be inside of a number of buildings and pick up the GPS position, even inside of a mall, the accuracy won’t be as good as outside, the directionality won’t be as good, but it does pick up the position and work to some extent.

I’ve touched on the price equation, it’s higher when you have Braille, the devices tend to be relatively in the same price ranges depending on what you’re getting, but we’ll come to that, when I talk to you about each of the one of the individual units. So I’ll get to that here in a minute, but I’m going to take a break now because you may accumulated some questions, and I’ve covered an awful lot of territory here, and I’ll stand by for any questions you might have.

Dawn TurcoMike, thank you, before I release the microphone to people who might have a question they can voice, we



had a question earlier from Jose who is joining us from Mexico today, and he was asking if GPS works in Mexico, and he was asking information about pricing and I don’t know if you know about the conversion to the Peso or information about Mexico, but that’s his question.

Michael MayIn terms of Mexico maps, well, worldwide there are maps for a lot of countries, there aren’t as many, but there aren’t any maps, or there is limited maps I should say for South America, for Central America, there are maps for Mexico, and Sendero’s next release, version 6 for the BrailleNote, there will be Mexico maps, and I’ve talked to a couple of the dealers of the adaptive technology in Mexico about carrying this, the price is prohibitive.

I mean these things are not cheap; it’s the biggest barrier to technology, when you get a $4,000 or $5,000 device whether you’re in Mexico or not, wherever you are in the world, typically most users have that funded by a department of rehabilitation or bureau of blind services or whomever.

In my estimation something like 30% of individuals will buy the adaptive technology themselves or with some help and 70% is done by rehab or a school or an



institution of some kind. So wherever you are, that’s going to be an important thing to consider getting these things funded, of course a cheaper device, like a phone if somebody’s funding it themselves and a phone is multipurpose, they make a lot more sense, than if you can’t afford one of the devices that has a Braille display.

So yes on Mexican maps, I don’t think there’s a BrailleNote in any of the other companies, perhaps Wayfinder would have Mexican maps, but I think because they’re coming online, as I said we license from the same suppliers, that eventually quite a few companies will add Mexico.

Otherwise, US, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, countries in Asia, you’re starting to see data from Brazil and Argentina, and before too long Chile, Eastern Europe, Middle East, so it’s quite a few places in the world, not much in West Africa, but you will see data for South Africa.

Dawn TurcoWell, let me release the microphone and see if we have any questions at this point, so here we go.

William Shaw



This is William Shaw, in the cities like Chicago where there are heavy winters and it is difficult to read Braille while we are walking, and if it is a noisy situation, even the voice input is not useful, do you suggest some way that we can still use GPS?

Michael MayYes, I would say think about moving. That is a serious challenge when your fingers get cold, which doesn’t take even Chicago temperatures, you can’t read Braille and so it’s important that you’re hearing, or using speech. So obviously it limits your ability to use GPS, is it’s snowing you’re going to want to get inside anyway, if you’ve got gloves on, you obviously can’t use Braille or easily use a Braille display.

You can put a unit under a jacket or inside of a backpack and zip it up and put it in the speech only environment, so you have to be a bit – two things. I’d say you’ll limit your outside use just for your own personal comfort and for how useful the device is outside and when you do need to use it, you’ll have to get creative.

Also consider in terms of weather, rain which may catch you off guard. It’s amazing how useful your average plastic grocery bag is, those things that you stuff into drawers and they become mountains of



bags that you don’t know what to do with. Well, keep one stuffed in your pocket either for your dog or for your Braille sense, because you can read through those things quite nicely and if you get caught out in a little bit of a downpour, you’d want to get inside quickly, but you can read through them and I find them quite useful for protecting them from the elements.

In terms of the noisy part of this, this is another big issue, because you’re either listening through a speaker on the unit, which is typically not quite loud enough, or a headphone. A Bluetooth headphone, a wireless headphone would be nice, a lot of people use these but you have to consider the ramifications of how that’s blocking your traffic sounds, so if you’re in a place where you’re able to hear your unit, but you’re not hearing the traffic, that’s not too smart.

So in a noisy environment, probably the most popular thing is for somebody to use an external speaker. There is many speakers that get pretty loud that you can either put in a pocket or up on the strap of the device that you’re carrying, so that it amplifies when you’re in really noisy settings.

Dawn Turco



I have a text message and I saw a hand up, Mike, so let me take the text message, and then I’ll release the microphone again. Jennifer is asking if you have both a cell phone and a PDA with a Braille display which does it make the most sense to get GPS on, and which device would the GPS work better on?



Michael MayWell, this is a lead-in to talking about some of the specific devices, so on the cell phone, you have two GPS options. You have Wayfinder, and you have Mobile Geo. Wayfinder runs on Symbian phones. Symbian is one of the operating systems almost all the Nokia phones use Symbian. So a lot of blind people have an N82. And that runs Symbian so the only option in that case is to get Wayfinder.

The Geo runs on Windows mobile phones and PDAs and those there’s a host of different devices, all the carriers have Window-based phones, and they run Mobile Speak as a screen reader, and Geo as a GPS. So the phone and the carrier may dictate which device you have, first and foremost, but let’s assume you have a phone, which would be better to use, the phone or a PDA.

This goes back to all the different interface issues that I was mentioning: the phone has a keypad, it’s harder and harder to find a phone with a number pad, and the qwerty keyboards on phones are tricky to use. Some blind people use them effectively and are okay with them.

A lot of people use the Moto Q units which have that kind of keyboard, but it’s preferable, I think most



people would like to have a number pad, because it’s just easier if you want to hit “4” for intersections, “8” for points of interest, you just hit one key to get a list, rather than having to figure out where that letter is on a particular qwerty keyboard. That’s trickier when you’re on the go, you know you’re not sitting at a desk where you can orient easily and you don’t get jostled. But you can pretty easily hit a button a number pad. So Window phones and Symbian phones have that so either Wayfinder or Mobile Geo would be useful.

In general I tell people if you can swing it to have both, do that, if you’re really in a financial tight situation, you can’t get anybody to fund one of the PDA devices then a phone really is your only option because of the price. And then you have to compare between Wayfinder and Geo. I’m come back to that later, but we’ll take the other question first.

Dawn TurcoI’m going to go ahead and release the microphone for the next person with a question.

MauriceHi Mike, how are you. This is Maurice. My question is why is it so difficult to get maps for countries in West Africa and other I guess so-called third world countries?



Michael MayYes, it’s needs to be commercially viable for these big companies, they have to have enough consumers, enough licenses sold to justify indefinite. So it’s strictly a commercial situation. Normally the way it evolves is that first of all the country has to have a rudimentary database of map data.

So in the US we had something that the Census Bureau developed for obvious reasons called Tiger data, an acronym that sounds like Tiger. And then what happened then was Tele Atlas and Navteq you can go get the Tiger data for free. And then they built on top of that, Tiger data.

So if you were in Ghana or Nigeria or Benin or someplace, first of all did the government already collect that data, if they didn’t you don’t even get started, I mean somebody is going to have to go out and start developing that information from scratch. If they did develop it, then that will help the likelihood that maybe a company will feel that okay, it’s basic data, but we can build on top of it, it’s a place to start with, and therefore we can make a commercial case for being able to use GPS. So it’s economically driven.



Nick StocktonHi, Nick Stockton here. I use Mobile Geo and I happen to live in the Portland area in my little Utopia of accessibility, and I just want to say I really love the ability to have the transit bus stops and be able to find near bus locations and get the stop by D number and all that information. I was just wondering how often do these different transportation companies like in Portland and Charlotte, how often do they contact you with updates to their system, like I know that Sendero updates their databases usually once a year, but how good have these different transportation companies been on contacting you with updates and getting those in?

Michael MayYou are lucky indeed. I love the aspect of that stop ID, where every single stop has a unique number, so you call up the local Portland transit phone number and you type in the stop ID, and the bus line that you’re interested in, and it tells you when the next bus is coming. It will say oh, 54 seconds or whatever.

And that’s something that I would see in the future being done automatically with your phone GPS being connected to that database and knowing your location, knowing the stop ID.



You are lucky indeed, because the gal who’s in charge of the GIS technology there is not only innovative, but she’s also a huge advocate, she came to us asking to put the Portland database into the BrailleNote, and she’s been bugging me the last two weeks at least saying when are you coming out with your next update. We’re changing formats to go to this Google format, because the Portland data has recently been updated, she’s really anxious for the blind users in Portland to have access. So you’re rare in having somebody who is technically and politically competent, but also a specific advocate for blind people to make sure that you have the latest and greatest information.

Dawn TurcoGreat, I have a text message from [Phena]. She says that she has a GPS, a Wayfinder and Bluetooth, and she’s planning on getting an external GPS and would like to know if she’s able to use the external GPS with her Bluetooth.

Michael MayProbably, it depends on the phone. Most devices these days if they have Bluetooth, they obviously have it in order to connect with external devices, headphones and Bluetooth GPS receivers would be the obvious connections.



So if you have Wayfinder and you have Bluetooth that would most definitely connect with an external GPS device, which should be better than the built-in unit. If you have an N82, the GPS in that is halfway decent, it’s better than some of the built-in GPS receivers which tend not to work very well under three miles an hour, which happens to be the speed people walk. So they’re not a lot of use walking.

Most GPS traditionally has been oriented for car use including with Wayfinder, the mainstream version of Wayfinder, or Wayfinder navigator so you’ve been able to utilize that; but with the external receiver you should be having better coverage.

Dawn TurcoI have a question from Judy, and she first compliments you on your presentation, then says that she and her husband both have BrailleNote GPS and asks if there is a receiver out there that they can both use at the same time?

Michael MayI don’t think so. I did hear from somebody once that told me there was a receiver that would allow two connections, but the Bluetooth protocol specifically prohibits this taking place on the device end. So the



phone – your phone can hook up to five devices, I’m not sure what the limit is there, but multiple devices, but the GPS receiver or the headphone for obvious reasons you don’t want it to be able to access multiple devices.

But I think one could be created, and I did hear of one, I just can’t give you a specific model. We’ll publicize it if we ever learn of one, and you’ve reminded me of this now, so I’ll keep my ears open and ask some of the GPS manufacturers if they know of any as well.

Dawn TurcoWe are caught up on the text messaging, what’s your druthers? Would you like to proceed?

Michael MayIf there’s any other questions I’ll take them, otherwise I’ll go and do a bit more about each device.

Dawn TurcoWell, I see Ricky’s hand up. Let’s try one more voice question.

RickyHi, first of all I hope you can hear me. Why is it that if you go to say Wal-Mart or somewhere you can buy a



GPS for $300 or $400, but the ones that are for blind or otherwise visually impaired people are in the like $800 to $1,000 or way up there in price, I mean you can pay a good $3,000 or $4,000 for one and why can’t a regular GPS be modified in such a way that a blind person could use one?

Michael MaySimple answer economies of scale. This is a, as I mentioned earlier, the number one challenge to adaptive technology is no longer the technology itself it’s the price of the technology. Why is the price high? Because we have specialized devices, and they’re being sold at low quantities. How many people buy Braille devices? I don’t know 5,000 a year, 10,000? Certainly not ten million. How many people buy a Garmin GPS receiver? Certainly, it’s got to be 10 million.

So there’s a huge difference both in terms of the hardware but also the licenses. So if a manufacturer sells 10,000 units a year, their license is going to be more costly than a license from somebody who’s selling 10 million and there is that order of difference between these specialized adaptive market, and the mainstream market.



The beauty always is when some mainstream market become accessible, there is usually trade-offs because like I’ve talked about with the iPhone, yes, it’s great to be able to say that it’s accessible, but does that mean that it’s very productive, it’s easy to use, I mean a lot of sighted people get iPhones because it’s intuitive and they can just touch it, and it’s really clear what to do with it. Why would a blind person get it if you can use it, yes, but it’s frustrating to go through the learning curve, that’s a question to ponder?

So there’s trade-offs here again, as I mentioned earlier in these different devices. You might find a device that is commercially somewhat usable. Like let’s say Nokia Maps for example on Nokia phones, you can use Nokia maps, it’s built-in, you can kind of fumble through it, but it doesn’t really give you one-tenth of the features that are on the specialized GPS units that sell for much more money.

This may change, you know GPS – adaptive GPS technology has only been around for nine years, commercial GPS has really only come into its own in the commercial arena in the last five years or so, so we’re just really on the beginning of that curve and you might see a commercial product to something like this more useable.



Dawn TurcoPhena has another text message asking if there is an external GPS which is most recommended?



Michael MayYes, I would recommend as I mentioned the i-Blue, i-Blue receiver is very sensitive, it uses the latest chip set, its sensitivity is the highest. It’s multi-channel in terms of satellite reception, so it’s an excellent receiver. It also has a tactile – a very distinct tactile switch, on-off, a lot of the GPS receivers have buttons that you push, they’re hard to find and then they – you know whether it’s on or off only by a light status, so that doesn’t do us any good.

Dawn TurcoAll right, well how about proceeding and we’ll take questions later?

Michael MaySo let me go through each of the devices and make a few comments about them on how do you distinguish one from the other, relative to the list of things that I’ve already gone through.

The BrailleNote has had GPS for the longest and there is some benefits to that in terms of user input and user feedback and development. These things evolve. Version 2 of a product is usually better than Version 1; at least it should be going that way. So that’s one thing to mention about the BrailleNote or VoiceNote, I’ve been about the Humanware products.



And I’ll mention all the PDAs first because they are similar in the fact that if you have one of them, you should probably get the GPS that matches it. So the BrailleNote and VoiceNote products, the Braille Sense, the Voice Sense products and then sometime probably by the summer shows in July, you’ll have this StreetTalk VIP from Freedom Scientific which had an earlier version based on Destinator, a commercial GPS product.

Relative to our last question it’s a good example of something where it was the good news/bad news, Destinator allowed the product to be cheap, but they were also focused on the mainstream side of market, it was being modified for the blind, and the manufacturer had little to no control over when and if those modifications came about.

So the Sendero GPS is now at the root of all of these products, the Braille Sense, the Voice Sense, they’re all using the Sendero engine, because we’ve built into this foundation the capability to drive all of these different units. They have different user interfaces, but they have the same fundamental capabilities. Just believe they use the Sendero, what’s called a software development kit, our foundation and the same maps, does not necessarily mean that they



implement every single feature. They have access to them, but they can make a choice and prioritize what they implement or not.

The SenseNav which runs on the Braille Sense products and the Sendero GPS on the BrailleNote, their commands if you know one you can operate the other, they’re 95% the same, there’s a few little differences on what’s implemented on each one, but they’re quite similar, at least in the past version. The BrailleNote version will be going up to Version 6 before too long, so there will be – there’s always going to be this leapfrog thing where there might be a new version on one unit, but they all have access to the same technology, so you can bet within six months the manufacturer is going to play catch up and then they might leapfrog over a different company.

But of those PDAs, they’re all unique and then if you have one, you should get the matching technology to go with it. If you don’t have one, and you’re saying I want to get a PDA with GPS, what should I get, which of these three manufacturers should I get? They all have a Sendero GPS base, so what’s the difference?

The first question I’d ask myself is “Self, what are the applications they use and what is the underlying



technology and the user interface?” There is a big difference between how the Braille Sense and the BrailleNote go through their different products. They all have internet, email, music players and the rest of that. They’re all pretty similar in that fashion.

But how is it done? In case of the GPS, 95% of the commands are the same between the Braille Sense and the BrailleNote, the way the other commands are implemented are not the same, you don’t always hit a “W” for word processor, or the way that you move up and down through a document is different. The way the menus are structured are quite different. BrailleNote has a unique software shell that the Braille Sense and some of these devices have. They’re all different.

So I would look at what are the other applications and what do you hear from other users about how easy it is to use and what its capabilities are. What’s the difference in hardware, because hardware evolves, and it doesn’t change as fast, so when a company has new hardware out, it’s going to be more attractive than a company that hasn’t changed hardware in a couple years.

But there’s not huge differences between these devices, and I certainly wouldn’t try to go into it now to



say what’s the difference between a PAC Mate, a BrailleNote, or a Braille Sense, there’s a lot of research you can do about that, but I would encourage a user who doesn’t have any of these and they’re considering a PDA, to do just that, to look at them.

Now, to talk about the, well there’s two more categories, one is the phone and it somewhat merges with the other category, which is the stand alone GPS units. The stand alones are the Trekker products from Humanware, and there’s two, the classic that can also be paired with a PDA, you don’t really want to think of the Maestro which goes with the Trekker in the same vein as you do a BrailleNote, a Braille Sense or a PAC Mate. It’s really not intended to be a full-fledged mainstream high level PDA with all of the different applications that the other three manufacturers offer.

But it does allow all of your basic functionality of word processing and some of that, but it’s using this 33 keypad Trekker interface. It is self-contained, it’s got different pieces, it’s not like the Breeze which is all one unit, it’s got multiple units and a speaker on a strap and it’s cabled together, so that’s a bit different in terms of hardware and it’s certainly more complicated than the Breeze, that’s the main reason



they came out with the Breeze, Humanware so they would have something that was really for basic GPS use.

There is a pretty significant hardware capability difference between the two Trekker units. The Breeze does not allow you, the main thing it does not allow you to do that the main Trekker does, the Trekker Classic is you cannot search for a nearby commercial point of interest and then ask for a route to it. And this is a pretty fundamental capability of most GPS units, they all do that one way or the other, they all allow you to search for a commercial point of interest, or to plug in an address, type in an address and give me a route to that location.

The Breeze does not do that. You have to create the route, or get the route from somebody else ahead of time. So it’s really more intended for people who are going to travel the same route over and over again, and they need a little guided angel on their shoulder telling them turn here, turn there. So what you do with a Breeze is you walk a route, you put it in the GPS record mode, it records the route and then you can either retrace that route, or however you want to use it in the future that you save it, and much the way you would save, let’s say if you walked around – along with a sighted person and a tape recorder and



just put the record button on, and they told you where to turn, it’s that kind of thing where you’re recording the route, but you have to have it recorded before you can navigate it.

I mentioned earlier that built-in chips may not be as sensitive as the latest chips, and that’s going to be the case with both the Trekker units that their GPS works fine, and there is just a release coming out, not software release that’s supposed to help that a little bit. I don’t know exactly how much but if you have the fundamental chip set in there that doesn’t change. But you have the great benefit of the portability of these devices.

The Breeze is just one unit, there is no separate GPS receiver, it’s simple, it’s got big buttons, they have a good contrast, so it’s an option again, and as I started this talk out I said it’s all about options, not one size fits all, so here is – it’s nice, because here is a unit people have asked for a long time, can’t I just have a simple GPS unit and you have it in Breeze.

You trade-off a lot of functionality for that, but it’s all about trade-offs and as long as you know what you’re getting and don’t think you’re getting a full-fledged GPS unit, but you just want the basics covered, then



you’re good with the Breeze. So those are the two stand-alone type units.

Then the Wayfinder and Geo are the two for mobile phones. Wayfinder with Nokia Symbian systems. And Wayfinder is based off of Wayfinder Navigator, which is a pretty decent product for sighted folks. It’s the only of the systems, of the accessible GPS systems that has a visual map. All the rest of these maps are being described which is what a blind person obviously wants but, since Wayfinder is based on a sighted product, it’s really intended for you guys driving down the road, to tell you where to get off the freeway and make your turns like any other GPS unit. It’s unique in that it’s getting the map data from a server, not from a card that’s on the unit.

All the other systems have locally based maps. There’s good news/bad news about that. The good news is theoretically the map data could be more updated, because you don’t have to download it or it’s on a server, and it’s updated if you want, it could be updated daily. The down side is if you lose your data connection and you haven’t downloaded the map ahead of time, you could be following a route, and all of a sudden you’re SOL, it just doesn’t work, so that’s one of the trade-offs, the good news/bad news about an online connection.



And as we all know, both voice and data connections can be lost, sort of like my falling off the face of the earth on this chat before. But the cell systems as you know you lose them at some places, so that’s one of the aspects of Wayfinder.

Mobil Geo runs on the Windows mobile phones. It’s based on the Sendero engine, so it has all the capabilities. They haven’t implemented all of the aspects of it the main thing that they haven’t implemented is the manual route recording. I haven’t talked about this with any of the systems, but it’s the BrailleNote and the Braille Sense products have done a really good job of implementing a manual route recording system. That’s useful for planning routes across campus, so the same thing you can do with the Breeze, where you can walk a particular route and record it, you can do on the BrailleNote and the Braille Sense, you can record that route and then retrace.

But additionally what you can do, that you can’t do on any of the other products, with manual route recording is you can walk along and when you make a turn – you can type in, let’s see I turn left, bushes on the right, broken sidewalk ahead, you can really customize a route very precisely so somebody who needs that kind of information, they need



environmental clues to clue them into where they are, and where they ought to be turning, because remember GPS, when it says turn, it may be 30 feet off, maybe 50 feet off, so you need either know that all right, well it’s telling me to turn, but I’m obviously not going to do that until I get to the next street, because I’m still 50 feet from the intersection.

Or if you have a manual route and it gives you some information that you can identify by touch or by hearing, then so much the better, it makes it even a more clear and easier to understand route. So that manual route recording is really quite valuable and available on the Sendero products but primarily the BrailleNote and Braille Sense products.

Geo does not have this yet, Wayfinder does not have it. The other main difference between Wayfinder and Geo would be with two things. One is Wayfinder doesn’t have a virtual explore mode, you can click on the map and you can arrow around and it will speak to you the streets if it happens to land on a street, it will tell you the street name as that cursor moves around the map, so it kind of works, but it’s more stabbing in the dark. It’s not really something that’s very functional, but it does it halfway.



Geo has a complete virtual explore mode, same as the BrailleNote, where you can make turns, explore block by block using the arrow keys, find out what points of interest are around, and as I said that’s an extremely valuable feature. So that virtual mode is a major distinction between Geo and Wayfinder.

And the other thing is the look around capability. Wayfinder has this way of describing intersection of points of interest, which takes some serious getting used to. It uses the 360 degree compass system. So as I said you will hear with any of these systems, name, distance and direction. So on Wayfinder, you’re going to hear something like, the name being 4th and F Street, 127 feet at 320 degrees north, and you’re saying huh? What was that? You hear too many numbers, distance and degrees mixed together, it’s manageable but it’s – I’ve never gotten used to it.

Some people like it and don’t seem to be annoyed by it, but that’s something that you’d have to be a person that could calculate all those things to get it straight. It’s quite confusing. And then in terms of look around information, all of the Sendero systems and Geo, particularly compared to Wayfinder, as you walk along, it’s going to say Starbucks on your left, Pink-A-Dot Fashion Shop on your right. It tells you what the



business is, and what side of the street it’s on as you’re going along one thing at a time.

Wayfinder does a bit of look around, but in a much different fashion and it tends to pile thing together, so you have to go – you have to pick a certain mode, it’s not going to automatically do this in the same fashion. So the look around capabilities and the explore capabilities are the two major differences between Wayfinder and Geo, Wayfinder has the online map capability, the good news/bad news with that, whereas Geo has the information contained on a card in the particular unit.

I’ll mention briefly Loadstone that is a Nokia-based product. Its greatest advantage is it’s free. So it can’t hurt to try it. It’s strictly a point of interest based system. But in certain parts of the world, a lot of blind people have gotten together and gotten databases of intersections. So there’s no connection from intersection to intersection. But you could be walking along and it could tell you 4th and F Street is ahead, because you’ve set it as a point of interest.

It’s not going to map you. It’s not going to route you anywhere. It’s not in same ballpark as any of these other products, but it does provide some useful information when we released our first laptop-based



version 1 in 2000, it was point of interest only, no map data, so they’re kind of at the point with that product where we were back then in terms of capabilities. The advantage is it’s free and it runs on a phone.

So I think I’ll take a break and we have about 10 minutes for any other questions then I can tell you more about each one of these devices.

Dawn TurcoVery good.

Stanley WindlesWhat kind of system does Loadstone run on in terms of telephones? Does it run on a Windows Operating System? Stanley Windles here.

Michael MayNo, it runs on Nokia phones, Symbian phones.

Dick WamserYes, this is Dick Wamser from Oregon. I’ve tried the Trekker Breeze a friend of mine has, and I borrowed it, and it doesn’t work, we’re just in too much of a hilly area. Back in 1998 there was a product which would allow you to do virtual exploring on the computer, and I’m wondering why some organization does not release that as an adjunct to the satellite server, since



it’s a verbal map type thing and/or if someone that has satellite system would not agree to give you a map of the area for a specific charge, is that a possibility?

Michael MayI didn’t hear that Dawn, could you repeat it?

Dawn TurcoOkay, it was rather long; let me get him to repeat it and get you a little bit closer to it. That was Dick, if you could speak up just a little bit please.

Dick WamserI’m sorry, I haven’t tried this mic yet, back in 1998 there was a verbal map program for Windows 95 for those who didn’t have satellite, our area does not have a reliable satellite system, because we’re in very hilly areas here. Is that still available in some degree, or would somebody be willing to make you up a map of basic streets and neighborhood configurations for a fee?

Michael MayI’m not sure what system you were talking about. The atlas system was available for maps. That was an accessible version from 1995 through about 2001, and we had a GPS version that was a prototype back



in those times. The GPS receivers have come a long, long way since then, and I’ve not found anyplace down Manhattan included, probably the worst case scenario where you cannot pick up GPS signals, the hills and trees would not be as challenging as downtown Manhattan with these sensitive receivers.

They’re really – they’ve come a long way. I don’t think that’s the problem. In terms of making up a map or any of that for an area, I’m sure again no matter where you’re located there are maps and off line you can send me in an email your particular location and I can tell you for sure what it comes up with in your neighborhood. But when I go to shows, we do this all the time, people come to the booth, and it’s a stump the GPS guys, and although there might be a particular street that’s not in the database, there’s no full area that isn’t.

I have an aunt that lived in Friendsville, Tennessee near Knoxville, and that’s a pretty remote little place with not that many people and even when I was using atlas back in 1995, I could easily, you know I found her location and the county roads, and I would mark the gate from her farm so I could find my way back from town and such. So there’s maps for almost everywhere.



Dawn TurcoWe have a text message from Jennifer asking if you have any information on the StreetTalk VIP that’s coming out this summer.

Michael MayWell, I had mentioned that’s on the drawing board and it’s in beta testing, so they’re still working out the kinks. It will use the same interface as the original StreetTalk in terms of command so people are StreetTalk Version 1 users will be able to go the VIP and have a similar a similar experience. So this will make it different than some of the other Sendero products in terms of user-interface but the foundation is the same, the maps are the same, access to the user points of interest, it will all be part of the same capabilities.

And I think we’ll probably expect to see something, although I don’t know, I’m just guessing, because things tend to happen in the adaptive tech world around the summer shows and around the Seasun show in March, so I would expect they’ll probably be demonstrated. They did show it at Seasun in March the first version of the StreetTalk VIP, so I think you’ll see probably a pretty close to finished version at the summer shows.



William ShawThis is William Shaw again, reading through [Tracks Through]. I remember that you are the pioneer of the very concept of GPS, and if it’s true, I would really like to congratulate you. I have another question, I happen to read in Matilda Zeigler that there is a speech software called Access to Go, and that software is free. I didn’t have a change to check, but if you have more information, there is some speech software available at no cost; do you think we can reduce the price of GPS?

Michael MayGood question, Speech Access to Go, there is a free version and then there is a paid version and you’re accessing, your screen reader is being used via the internet, it’s a pretty neat concept and the problem would be that you’d have to able to have access to the internet from your local device in order – even for that concept to work, let along that screen reader.

But it’s an interesting question, because as we get more connectivity in this country, and we’re behind Europe and Japan and other places in terms of connectivity, as we get higher speed online connections, it’s certainly possible that online GPS and screen readers would present a different opportunity than we have today with the dedicated



systems. So that’s an interesting point that you bring up.

In terms of being a pioneer, I suppose my greatest pioneer characteristic is that I’m stubborn and keep going even nobody else is going down the road I’m going down. I didn’t pioneer GPS in general, it’s been around since the early 80s, turned over for use by civilians in 1984 by Ronald Reagan, further implemented and improved by Bill Clinton in 2000, and I was just a hungry blind person for information, so in 1994, when went to work at Arkenstone and this was first on the drawing table, I joined a number of people who had been thinking about this and my main partner Charles LaPierre from Canada who does the development on this had started it in a school project at Carlton University.

So a number of minds came together and my main ingredient was just being stubborn and going ahead with it. So thank you, I’m glad to have played that part in it.

Dawn TurcoWe have a text question asking if you can purchase the i-Blue GPS at any store, and what is the price?

Michael May



I don’t know if you can get it in a store, you can get it online, and I would suspect online it’s probably about $60 depending on where you get it. If you buy it from Sendero, it comes with a case, so there is a customized case with a clip and a little strap to accommodate so you pay a bit more for that. So that would be a couple things for you to consider.

One thing I wanted to mention, it’s not exactly along with these other GPS products, but an important thing to consider and that’s tactile maps. And we have worked with Smith Kettlewell Institute specifically with Dr. Josh Mealey to make our Sendero through Tele Atlas available for what’s called the T-map project.

And the way that works is that you can call the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco and they’ll tell you how to do all of this, but the idea is you go online, you plug in your address for a particular location, you tell it the scale that you want and then it generates a Braille, tactile Braille map with legends, with Braille labels for that particular location, they emboss it, they either send you the file so you can emboss it if you have one, or I don’t know if they charge for it, I think it might be free, or maybe only free in California, I’m not sure. But then you have that particular map sent to you.



So that is a really valuable augmentation to GPS, because GPS gives you great details understanding and exploration of a particular city. It doesn’t give you the overview of a tactile map, so it’s really nice to do both, if you’re really trying to get a good understanding of something you have the tactile geographic understanding and the detailed GPS capabilities.

Dawn TurcoWe have kind of a double question and it’s related to the Trekker, if you would have information about this, do you know if Trekker software interface, if they’re planning to put that on other devices besides the current PDA, and she would also like to know to have you talk about how to vary the announcement and info level people get from these devices. It’s been said that the Sendero products almost give too much information and she knows these can be varied.

Michael MayFirst about Trekker software being on other devices. I don’t know the inter-workings of Humanware, logically it would not make sense, there are so many devices out there, and Sendero has covered most of them, there aren’t too many devices without GPS on, there are a few, and there may be other products that you could see the Trekker software on, or the Sendero



software, but the primary ones are already covered, and it’s a small market, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go through a lot of development, and then you only 50 or 100 customers, it doesn’t pay for it. So you just think of it from that standpoint, it’s possible, but not likely.

In terms of information, that’s a good point, and it’s something, it’s always tough to get excited and to brag about all the capabilities of the Sendero products and talk about all their features without the feeling that well this is too complicated, this is a sophisticated system, it’s also often referred to as the Rolls Royce or the Cadillac of GPS. So there’s two parts to this, one is some people need a Volkswagen, and some people need a Rolls Royce, it depends on a lot of different things, but there are both options out there.

We’ve always tried in the Sendero products to build in the verbosity levels. So if you want you don’t have to even touch the product ever and you can turn down the information to be minimal. We have to guess in a default what would most people like most of the time and then choose that as the default. So it may be that that’s too much information for somebody if they really only want to just follow a route and not hear about the whole environment and their look around mode is turned on.



Well, it’s a simple command to turn it off, it’s two keystrokes, but and the default is to look around would be turned on and it might seem like too much information for somebody.

Dawn TurcoVery good. Let me just check as we’re winding down here if there are any other quick questions. I’m releasing the microphone.

Stanley WindlesYes, do you have any – Stanley Windles calling again, do you know anything about Microsoft Live Search? Is it accessible; is it a POI only sort of software? And also do you know anything about; you mentioned that the (inaudible 1:49:11) products might be available. I have heard blind people using Co-Pilot; do you know anything about that? Are they still accessible?

Michael MayThere are a number of commercial products, which are to some degree accessible and not for the faint of heart. And they even for the best capable users, they’re not going to be as useful as any of these products we’ve talked about, but a lot of times they’re free, it doesn’t hurt to mess around with them, and so



I would encourage people to try them out. Sometimes I get a chance to try them out, sometimes I don’t; I depend on feedback from other people on lists to tell me, I have not heard of a commercial product that is really viable yet.

The only one that I know that’s really taking root seriously in France is the Kapten, that’s the only place it’s currently available in terms of an off-the-shelf commercial product that costs $300 I think. But Microsoft Live Search, some of the Google products, there’s one called [Belly Sift], there’s one application that you can download onto your phone, both for tracking and also for being tracked.

There are also, we didn’t even talk about that, but there are products for being tracked, and there’s one called Spot Inc., which has a satellite upload that you can take it around with you and if you want you can give the URL to somebody who can go view where you are. Google has a produced called, I’m just tried it recently with my son, so he knows where I am exactly. I don’t know where he is because it’s not accessible at all, but we’ve tried these things and showed the information on the different lists.

Dawn Turco



Well, how about we take one more question and then get ready to close for today, I do see hands up, so let’s see who gets in.

CallerHello, I had actually two. Can you A, repeat the name of the one with the tactile maps, two does it only work with particular embossers like the Tiger or can you use it with more mainstream like Index, and I had a third one, oh, the Trekker Breeze, how many pre-recorded routes can it memorize at one time? Like can I have a map to the bank, as well as map to the grocery, as well as the – I myself am a Geo user, but I was thinking about a few clients.

Michael MayAs far as the T-map product, there is two places you can check the Smith Kettlewell site, they probably have information, it’s simply ski.org, S-K-I.O-R-G. And the San Francisco Lighthouse I think is sf-lighthouse.org and look for their link about T-maps and at either one of those places they’ll give you details on how to use it or how to access it, what the details are.

As far as number of routes you can save on the Breeze, I don’t think there’s any limitation, because you can always save them on the memory cards, and



those are pretty large these days and route files are pretty small.

MauriceQuestion, if you have a moment I don’t know.

Dawn TurcoOne more Maurice, and then we’ll call it we’ll start our wind down.

MauriceThank you so much. Mike, just two quick questions. Would you be kind enough to share with us what three systems do you use, that’s one, and the other question I have for you is, maybe you’ve answered this, can I install a map directly into any of the systems and use it, if it’s not available in an area that I’m trying to visit.

Michael MayYes, as far as what I use. I’m testing them all, I like to know the differences because it’s small and it has Braille, and so we tend to use what we’re familiar with. You know it’s harder to learn another device and to know the commands for all of them. I of course use Geo, but I also use the K-NFB reader on an N82, so I’m carrying two phones and a BrailleNote PK.



There’s no room left to carry a Braille Sense and a PAC Mate as well, you know probably for shows and things I would do that, but those are the devices I personally use, but I test all of them and spend time with them, so that I understand the benefits of each.

I’m not sure I understand your question about maps. I mean you can – yes, you can download maps, when you buy into these products, they usually come with an entire country, so you’d get a US map, or you’d get a UK map, actually in our next version we’re going to bundle, so you get US and Canada together, you get 16 European Countries together, you get three Asian countries together, that sort of thing, so if you want, if that comes with the base product, and then if you want another country, you can always add it on.

Dawn TurcoWell, thank you for that, Michael May. We do appreciate your time today and your wonderful presentation. It has come to the end of our time, and let me just close out with a couple announcements.

Number one if you would like to listen to this presentation again, or recommend it to a friend, we will have it up on the Hadley website in just a couple days, and you go to Hadley.edu and just follow the



links to the past seminars page, and you will have the recording for streaming or for download.

Also, if you have any feedback that you’d like to provide regarding today’s presentation or recommendations for future presentations, you can do so at [email protected], and we love getting the input from listeners.

Those of you who were on today for continuing education hours, at the point of registration, you received information on how to access the quiz, go back to that confirmation email for directions and the quiz will be available shortly. Again, this is was our first time offering continuing education hours for seminars at Hadley.

If you are interesting in registering for those which are as I mentioned at the outset, ACVREP approved this time around, you can still do so by going to our web page and going through the process to register for that. It is a separate process. We will be offering more seminars for credit.

In fact in a month from today in July we will be offering a seminar on Macular Degeneration for those interested. We do appreciate your staying with us


mailto:[email protected]


today, as participants, and the many good questions. And thank you for your support of Seminars@Hadley.

Mike you were wonderful, I was going to say I’m going to release the microphone, but you’re right here with me by phone, so if you’d like to say a final farewell, now is the time.

Michael MaySure. Well, thanks for inviting me and taking your valuable time to listen. I hope it’s been helpful. In terms of other follow-up resources, all of the different products I have talked about whether Sendero carries them or not, are available with links and information and reviews at accessiblegps.com, accessible of course with an “I”, accessiblegps.com and look for schedules where we’ll be presenting and demonstrating at the various conferences coming up.

If anybody has a particular event that you would like to have a GPS seminar at, or if you want to do something creative, a Geo caching or a Wayfun event or something in your area, I’m always game for new adventures and look for the opportunity to meet some of you and to push this GPS envelope even further. So thanks so much for having me.



Dawn TurcoWell, I have to tell you we just had a text message with a congratulations on your presentation, and the message says that each time she listens to a presentation on technology and GPS, a little more sticks. So we hope that a lot sticks with a lot of people today. And again, thank you for attending Seminars@Hadley. We wish you a great afternoon, check out the archive if you want to listen again. I know there was a lot of information. That’s at Hadley.edu. Thank you Mike. Thank you everyone.

[End of Audio 1:58:29]


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