Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 23 - Poland (try it yourself) Click to open/close

So Apple did flip the switch at last and today's window is ready for all of you to try out.
Zuzanka is an app made by Zatoichi, a Warsaw-based startup with one of my blind friends as a tester and head consultant. It reads out the expiry dates on products so it's perfect to run through everything in your fridge before Christmas to see whether your supplies are still safe to be consumed. Once you start it, it will beep continuously to tell you it is ready. Then, once something that it may consider to be a date is found in the camera, it will start beeping faster until it finally recognizes and speaks the date outloud. There is a handy tutorial added telling you where expiry dates are commonly found on different products. The app gives you a 24-hour trial period and a handful of subscription options which I believe should be affordable. There is a lifetime license option too capped at around 30 €.
The AI models for this app have been predominantly trained on products found in Polish supermarkets and I was successful using it on a pack of German Balsen chocolate biscuits so it is interesting to see whether this could work in other countries.
https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/zuzanka/id6444279925
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Poland #Mobile #Startup #Shopping

‎Zuzanka

‎Zuzanka is the world's first expiry date scanner. The app makes it easy to locate expiration dates on food products, converts them to text format and allows export to other applications.

^{App Store}

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 22 - Czech Republic Click to open/close

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind: day 20 - Spain Click to open/close

Today let's go to Spain where a system allowing the blind to control elevators using a smartphone app has been developed.
The way it works is by detecting a Bluetooth beacon near a supported elevator using the dedicated app and calling the elevator almost as if we pressed the physical button. We can then choose the floor where we want to go and, once we board the elevator, notify the app about it and wait until we reach the destination. We will be notified about the arrival through a notification in the app. The developers have even thought of Siri support so you can set shortcuts for favourite elevator +floor combinations. The solution is presented within the following session of the Zeroconf conference in Vienna:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PcPk3BcULQ
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #BuildEnvironment #Spain

ZeroCon22: Zero Project`s Shark Tank

Welcome to #ZeroCon22 - The Zero Project Conference 2022 on Accessibility!Five high-tech start-ups pitch to experienced investors, who question their potenti...

^YouTube

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 19 - made in Poland Click to open/close

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 18 - Czech Republic Click to open/close

Back to the Czech Republic we go, where remote assistance of blind and partially sighted people was in operation years before AIRA was founded.
The navigational center of the Czech Union of the Blind assists their customers in many ways:
- by delivering help through the user's smartphone's camera via Skype;
- by looking up information on public transport routes and general information on places of interest;
- best of all: by researching routes that the user would like to take bearing in mind everything that is of importance when travelling independently with a white cane or/and a guide dog, including possible hazards or characteristic waypoints and landmarks.
It comes as no surprise that the service is available throughout the entire country. Pricewise, it works in two models: it is possible to buy packages of single uses of the service starting at less than six dollars for ten single uses; or a periodic subscribtion starting at around 13 dollars for three months.
https://www.portal-pelion.cz/aplikace-a-sluzby-vyuzitelne-pri-sebeobsluze-a-samostatnem-pohybu-zrakove-postizenych/
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #CzechRepublic #Mobility #PublicTransport

Aplikace a služby využitelné při sebeobsluze a samostatném pohybu zrakově postižených - Pélion

V textu si povíme o aplikaci, která existuje již pár let, ale i tak se stává, že o ní někdo slyší úplně poprvé. Je to aplikace Be My Eyes.

^{Linda Albrechtová (Pélion - Vzdělávací portál pro zrakově postižené)}

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 17 - Poland Click to open/close

Today's highlight is not strictly accessibility-related but it is in itself accessible and definitely makes electronic payments in Poland quick and painless for everyone.
Blik is a Polish payment system that is based on six-digit codes entered as a confirmation of payment on the website where you want to make a transaction. The way this is used is the following:
1. You open the app of your bank on your phone and press the Blik button. Sometimes banks will place this feature under the app's shortcuts so starting straight from the homescreen or through a shortcut you yourself created is definitely possible.
2. A six-digit code is generated and it is read out to you. You can remember or copy it and from that moment you've got 120 seconds to finish the transaction.
3. You enter the code on the website or in the app where you're trying to complete a transaction.
4. You return to your banking app to confirm the amount to be paid through the biometric authorization method of your choice or a PIN code. In my banking app the time limit is counted down with each second being marked with a chaptic feedback of my iPhone.
Note: meanwhile regular payment terminals already support Blik and more and more shop assistants know how to activate it so the phrase "Poproszę Blikiem" ("By Blik, please") is more commonly heard.
Another component of the system are the P2P micropayments to a mobile phone where it is enough to enter the other party's phone number to make or request a payment straight from the banking app.
I believe similar systems function in other countries but are mostly QR-code based and require a separate app. I find this way much handier. Also, it is universal across all major Polish banks.
https://blik.com/en/how-to-use-blik
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Shopping #Banking #Mobile #Poland

How to use BLIK

BLIK in a blink of an eye! Pay for your purchases, wherever you are, in a few moments, with BLIK`s fast and secure payments!

^blik.com

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 16 - France Click to open/close

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 15 - Austria Click to open/close

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 14 - France Click to open/close

Since some time I have been drawn to research Minitel, a French Videotex-based system for accessing information that predates the Internet. It was a revolution in terms of digitalization which made activities such as buying train and plane tickets, signing up for classes and reading newspapers digitalized as early as the 80's. You can read more about it in the following Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
There were many devices invented to make Minitel accessible to the blind, although the system itself wasn't designed with this target group in mind. Mostly, they were external speech synthesizers like in the case of Lectel:
https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/12/10/les-ordinateurs-ont-la-parole_2931817_1819218.html
or the Valentine text-to-speech card for the Apple II:
https://blog.atalan.fr/valentine-carte-de-synthese-vocale-nee-en-1986/
The history of the Eurobraille company, the makers of the popular Esys, Esytime and B.Note Braille displays, starts also with a speech synthesizer for the Minitel terminals.
https://www.eurobraille.fr/notre-histoire/
As I found out, however, most of France's blind community at that time did not have access to this kind of technology and Minitel only became accessible on a global scale in the 90's when regular PC's did but then it was almost the time of the Internet so it never gained the same momentum as it did with the society at large. Pity as this could have been an opportunity to push the inclusion of blind and partially sighted people to whole new levels.
Always design with accessibility from the start!
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #France #Internet #Minitel #Videotex #RetroTech

Les ordinateurs ont la parole

Un Salon vient d'être consacré aux machines parlantes et aux innovations techniques destinées aux aveugles. Le matériel existe, pas encore le marché !

^{CHRISTIAN TORTEL (Le Monde)}

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 13 - Sweden - expand the content warning to open the window for today Click to open/close

Today's one might be familiar to some of you as this has received a bit of media attention bacccccccccccccccccback in 2016 when Sweden hosted the Eurovision Song Contest.
To celebrate another win, for the time of the contest's duration, the audible traffic lights at some of Stockholm's locations have been revamped to play Loreen with "Euphoria" (winner of the 2012 ESC) when the lights are red, then when they turn green, they ticked to the beat of Mans Zelmerlow's "Heroes", the song that brought the contest back to Sweden in 2015. What a fun twist on an accessibility feature!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj3V06ThvoY
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Sweden #Eurovision #ESC #UrbanEnvironment #Music #SoundDesign

Music Traffic Lights Stockholm Eurovision Song Contest 2016 (Take 1)

This was take 1 - I decided to re-record this a second time.

^YouTube

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 12 - Poland - expand the content warning to open the window for today! Click to open/close

Somehow we made it through the first half of this calendar. Thank you for all of your interactions and encouragement. It's very motivating to see how far these little posts can reach.
So I realized that all the time I have been doing this calendar, I haven't mentioned Poland, where I come from, once. Shame on me! Let's try to make it right.
Inpost is the pioneer as the provider of parcel locker technology in Poland. It's quite common to order something and, instead of requesting that the package is delivered directly to your door, have it dropped at one of the lockers which are often located quite centrally, at a post office or another place of significance in a given city, town or village.
Inpost have come up with quite a clever way of allowing blind people to open these lockers and find the right door. Not only is the app itself accessible so you can track your delivery all the way through but once your order arrives, all you have to do is go to the place where your locker is located, open the door for your parcel from within the app and read the instruction telling you which door is yours E.G. third up, sixth to the left of the touch screen. The system has become so useful for the general public that in order to become more sustainable, Inpost have begun installing screenless lockers so that everything has to be done with the app. This way, it is also possible to send a package somewhere without the need to stick a physical label on it. Other accessibility accommodations include the "easy access zone" as per the link below.
https://inpost.pl/en/help-easy-access-zone-we-answer-your-questions
What are you ordering this Christmas and how is it delivered to you?
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Poland #Shopping

Easy Access Zone - we answer your questions | InPost

^inpost.pl

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 11 - Germany - expand the content warning to open the window for today! Click to open/close

As the app that is the star of today's window has updated on my phone today, let me introduce you to Greta, the German app for audiodescription, closed captions and other forms of accessibility in movies.
It works by first downloading an encrypted, I believe, copy of the movie's audio and then when we want to watch it described or subtitled, we just start the app, let it listen to the sound around us and it will tune in at the right spot in time with the accessibility accommodations we need. Should you forget your headphones to hear the audiodescription in, you can still listen to it over the earpiece. The system is not context-aware so it can tune into the movie at a cinema or at home when watching on the Internet or on TV which gives universal access to all the accommodations. The only wish I would have is more independent cinema productions and the ability to combine multiple adjustments so that I could watch that movie with a lot of Austrian dialect in it with both audiodescription and subtitles.
Today's update brings sound amplification. If I understand correctly, you can also have the actual audio track of the movie played through your phone in sync with the original.
I believe the concept was replicated in other countries already so you might know it under another name.
https://www.gretaundstarks.de
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Germany #Culture #Movies #Audiodescription #Cinema #TV #Subtitling

Kino einfach gemeinsam erleben mit GRETA und STARKS

Barrierefreies Kino für Alle! Audiodeskriptionen und Untertitel überall und einfach auf dem eigenen Smartphone mit den Apps GRETA und STARKS.

^{GRETA und STARKS | Audiodeskription und Untertitel}

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 10 - Luxembourg - expand the content warning to open the window for today Click to open/close

Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: Day 9 - Belgium - expand the content warning to open the window for the day. Click to open/close

Back in 2018 I spent a month in Brussels. It was the first time I lived in a capital city so it was quite a stressful experience: not much time, a couple of routes to learn, pretty loud and congested streets and trash bags put directly on the pavements - an easy target to hit with a white cane. I enjoyed it though and one takeaway I've got is how easy to read the tactile plans at the Brussels central station are.
Normally, I have difficulties relating what I touch on a tactile plan of a building to the real world. That station made a heavily simplified version of the experience by placing a pole at each crossroad of the tactile floor marking, with a simplified tactile plan at the top telling you where each of the forks of the floorline would take you. It looked a lot like the four navigation keys and the confirmation key on a classic mobile. Each of the arrows ended with a Braille description of the destination in both French and Dutch. This was a great help.
Also QDos to the sound designers who created the jingle for the Brussels public transport company. It's a pretty dancey beat of five notes played on a synthesizer which would make a nice text tone. Find it at the end of the company's promo video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmNBW0jdmso
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Belgium #PublicTransport

Go Easy MIVB

http://goeasy.mivb.behttp://www.stib-mivb.be/https://twitter.com/STIBMIVBhttps://www.facebook.com/lastibhttps://www.facebook.com/mijnmivbhttps://www.linkedin...

^YouTube

Content warning: Accessibility for the blind advent calendar: Day 8 - Austria (Part 2) Click to open/close

Content warning: Accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 8 - Austria (Part 1) - expand the content warning to open the window for today Click to open/close

Content warning: The #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: day 7 - Australia and New Zealand - expand the content warning to open the window and discover the interesting fact for the day Click to open/close

Content warning: The #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: Day 6 - France with potential global impact - expand the content warning to open the window and discover the interesting fact for the day. Click to open/close

The 6th of December is traditionally the day when Santa comes and brings small gifts to children in Poland and several other countries (not to be confused with the 24th of December which is also when gifts, bigger ones, are distributed). Obviously somebody's got to pay for all these nice things so how to do it in an accessible way?
I thought of including Handsome, a French fintech dedicated to serving customers with visual impairments, as a part of this calendar, as it offers an accessible voice payment card; a dedicated concierge service, insurance in case of damage to assistive devices or stranding with no immediate mobility options. They can be found at:
https://howtobehandsome.fr/
Imagine my shock this morning when I discovered that through cooperation with the Tales Group, Handsome's voice card has become global so it's a matter of time before banks start introducing it.
The card is equipped with a Bluetooth LE chip, connects to the customer's smartphone either through their banking app or a specially designed one; then, once its inserted into the terminal, it delivers all of the status messages to the app E.G. the amount to be paid or the current state of the payment process. This way it is possible to avoid being scammed on the amount and we can make sure all is well with our transaction.
I'm curious if any banks are going to introduce this any time soon.
https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-security/banking-payment/cards/voice-payment-card
#Accessibility #Blind #France #Banking #AdventCalendar

Thales Gemalto Voice Payment Card

Discover how visually impaired people can make each payment transaction more secured and trusted.

^{Thales Group}

Content warning: The #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: day 5 - Italy - expand the content warning to open the window and discover the interesting fact for the day. Click to open/close

Content warning: The #accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar, day 4: Slovakia - expand the content warning to open the window and discover the interesting fact for the day Click to open/close

Content warning: The #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: day 3 - The Czech Republic - expand the content warning to discover the interesting fact for the day Click to open/close

To mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, today's window opens up to one of my favourite treasure troves of good practices regarding accessibility for the blind - the Czech Republic which I am currently only one hour of a car drive away from.
Did you know that by 2004 Czech Republic was the second European country right behind Sweden with the widest network of audible traffic lights? Not only that but they already started installing tactile floor markings and my favourite invention, the remote controls for the build environment.
The Czech remote control is a tiny box with six buttons that each blind individual can purchase. Using this aid, a blind person navigating through a Czech city can check any public transport schedule available at any stop, confirm the line of the bus or tram that just came, alert the driver to their presence so that they can let them in or out of the vehicle, navigate around the Prague underground, trigger audible traffic lights to be switched on and locate some of the key buildings such as the Blind Union's HQ's.
Although many cities of Europe have meanwhile tried to implement a similar system, the Czech Republic is the only country I know of that offers such a wide range of services in the entire country this way. I was very impressed the first time I tested this and I love coming back to our southern neighbours. Ahoj a zdravim vas s Polska!
Below, an article of the Czech radio broadcaster back from 2004 explaining the accommodations along with audio samples in Real Audio, if you can still play that.
https://english.radio.cz/czech-blind-united-making-czech-towns-and-cities-friendlier-blind-and-visually-8087072
#Accessibility #Blind #UrbanEnvironment #BuildEnvironment #CzechRepublic #AdventCalendar

"Czech Blind United" - making Czech towns and cities friendlier to the blind and visually impaired

Many foreign visitors to Prague or elsewhere in the Czech Republic are often puzzled by the ticking sound of traffic lights at pedestrian crossings. It is the acoustic…

^{Radio Prague International}

Content warning: #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: day 2 #Switzerland - open the content warning to discover the interesting fact for the day Click to open/close

Content warning: #Accessibility for the #Blind advent calendar: day 2 #Switzerland - open the content warning to discover the interesting fact for the day Click to open/close

Content warning: The accessibility for the #blind advent calendar - day 1: 🗾 Open the content warning to discover the interesting fact for the day Click to open/close