As I prepare for my talk on the accessibility benefits of well curated POI data in Open Street Map for the upcoming State of the Map 2026 conference, I think I found a way, sort of, to play a game similar to Geoguessr for a completely blind person. There's a random GPS coordinates generator at random.org/geographic-coordina… which shows you a piece of our planet on OSM. You take the latitude and longitude it spit out and feed it to Seeing Assistant Go, then pull the POI for the matched location and have fun while taking a virtual walk around a neighbourhood somewhere out there, browsing the different establishments, infrastructure etc. Spent a bit of afternoon yesterday exploring the different churches serving various language communities around the Main Street in Ottawa, visiting websites and Wikipedia articles - so many questions to ask if I ever speak to anyone from that area. Ach yeah, Piracema is a town in Brazil. Just letting you know since the thickets of trees alongside the car road leading there weren't much of an indication and I actually had to look the place up. #OSM #Cartography #Accessibility #Blind
This entry was edited (Saturday, July 4, 2026, 8:44 AM)

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

@Paweł Masarczyk Fun thing and nice initiative.
I believe you already know all of this but just to remind, these two tools are #OSM powered too. First one is fully exclusive with #a11y from the start, the second one has some screen reader accessibility built-in too.

audiom.net/

mapcomplete.org/blind_osm.html

in reply to Peter Vágner
@pvagner Thanks! Yes, I'm aware of those. Audiom is great, I guess I just lack the spatial awareness that would help me to understand fully the structure at hand. I might play the Geoguessr with that once I'm at a computer again. I tried Map Complete the first time the developer introduced accessibility improvements and I recall it generating an aria-live alert each time I pressed an arrow key so that NVDA said "Alert" every time I moved. Has that changed?
in reply to Peter Vágner
@pvagner I understand that mapping the datapoints to some kind of native control is not feasible, still not having the word "alert" for every step would reduce verbosity. Maybe the new aria-notify API is the right match for this kind of purpose or else another type of live region.
in reply to Peter Vágner
@pvagner Meanwhile: there's a Windows software similar to Audiom which was written by a Polish developer who I believe is also helping out with Seeing Assistant Go or was at least consulting it. It's called Grmapa grmapa.zlotowicz.pl/ - at the moment I'm also trying to convince the developer of Street Complete and Every Door to make these tools accessible so that blind OSM users can also contribute data, not just consume it. That's my biggest hope for my State of the Map participation.
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk
@Paweł Masarczyk I think I have used EveryDoor on Android to rename one of the pubs around here once and it worked.
I can't remember how consistent the accessibility of the app is but I was able to manage that.