The challenge of developing blind-friendly cars

For most of the able-bodied folks, this would sound ridiculous. But the world of visually challenged regards this as a serious mission, the one that would likely confirm their independence and stand as a symbol of their ability to take charge of their own affairs.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in the United States, which has played a key role in changing the way the blind use technology to empower their lives in the 21st century, has laid the foundation for ‘blind friendly’ cars, drawing parallels with the first manned mission to the moon.

NFB Jernigan Institute — the only research and training facility developed and directed by the blind — has announced ‘Blind Drivers Challenge,’ asking universities and research institutions in the US and overseas to create a car “that doesn’t drive the blind around, but is driven by the blind.” The institute, which is completing its first decade, draws its inspiration from the words of Dr Marc Maurer, president of NFB, who, at the time of its inauguration, had speculated that the institute would create technology significantly different from the ones already in use such as the blind-driven automobile.

“The challenge is to develop a car that has enough innovative technology to convey real-time information about the driving conditions to the blind so that people who possess capacity, an ability to think and react, and a spirit of adventure, in addition to having the characteristic of blindness, can interpret these data and maneuver a car safely,” wrote Mark Riccobono, executive director, NFB Jernigan Institute, in ‘Braille Monitor’ magazine.

Already, technologies such as text-to-speech engines, screen readers and optical character reader (OCR) software have tremendously changed the way a blind person would read, write and communicate with others. With the advent of mobile, we have portable screen readers on the mobile phones, OCR software that would convert pictures taken with the mobile phones into speech and GPS-based software that would provide the blind directions while commuting in different cities. The NFB has collaborated with Kurzweil Technology Inc (KTI) in bringing out the KNFB reader, that functions as portable OCR on smartphones like Nokia N82 and N97. So immense is the technology today that it would soon be difficult for our auto drivers to take us for a ride, since the mobile phone in our hands would tell us the route.

Text Reader

Recently, Intel introduced a ‘Text Reader’ in the US, that let  both the visually challenged and those with learning difficulties to take snapshots of printed pages and read them through the voice interface of the device. Though technology experts amongst the blind feel such special products which are not used along with the mainstream products like mobile phones, are unlikely to see further developments, Intel’s innovation is certain to proliferate reading devices in the market, especially given that it can serve the disability population in India and also thousands of elderly people in western countries.

Technology, indeed, has helped people with blindness to claim equality with everyone in terms of products and services available to others. So why this experiment, especially when several visually challenged persons have learnt to organise themselves without the need to drive their own vehicles. Given a chance, no blind person would like to contribute to the already existing chaos in the roads of Bangalore, especially with all their desire to lead a healthier lives without further disabilities. But the thought of being on one’s own, controlling the speed and even the direction of the vehicle all by oneself is certainly a stimulating one.

In a wonderfully sketched article (in ‘Braille Monitor’), Riccobono explains how the idea of driving a car is not the goal, but can be the product of innovation that would open up several unthought-of areas of human-technology interface.

“This is not unlike the race to the moon of the 1960s,” Ricccobono asserts. “The technologies created to get the US to the moon have had profound impact on our society. Likewise, the innovations of the NFB-BDC will forever change the way we view technologies for the blind as well as the capacity for excellence possessed by the blind themselves.”

Impact of technology

For centuries, efforts of the scientists to develop technologies for the disabled had resulted in path-breaking inventions. It is well-known that how Alexander Graham Bell ended up inventing the telephone, while all he wanted was a machine that could make the deaf hear. Who thought that invention, of all, would change our lives for good in the 21st century?

Of course, we are not talking only about grandiose things, even a relatively small utility such as sub-titles were invented for the deaf to understand the spoken conversations in a movie. In the late 1960s, Dr Winton Serf, who was  amongst the team that had developed the TCP/IP, the protocol behind the functioning of the internet, wanted to create a mechanism for the deaf to exchange written messages using the same telephone line people with hearing are using, an idea that resulted in the invention of emails, which has profoundly changed the way we communicate today.

The mission, as stated by Riccobono, is to bridge the gap between existing mainstream technology and those used by the blind to access them. This is where the ‘moon mission’ sounds the  same as the Blind Driver Challenge project. The momentum which human race had gathered in the ’60s to conquer the moon has substantially improved our understanding of the outer space and the universe. It had inspired children of that generation and has given new focus to astronomy and astrophysics.

The blind-driven automobile would not only elevate us from claiming the ‘handicapped’ seats in busses to be on the driver’s seat, it would help us advance the cause of being equals to others and use our abilities to contribute to social advancement.

Availability of such a vehicle in the future would only give us the choice between public transport and transport of our own. It would also create fresh obstacles for us in terms of ‘changing the laws’ and social mind-sets to accommodate the new vehicle. But the very thought that it would bring together some of the best minds in the world to create a hitherto unheard of technology only stirs our appetite.