Category: Uncategorized

As reported by Jeff Bishop in his Desert Skies blog (link above) yesterday, both Humanware and Freedom Scientific have publicly acknowledged they have changed hands. The Humanware transaction, due to regulations in New Zealand, received coverage in the mainstream press as even privately held companies in that country must provide a certain level of public disclosure. Freedom Scientific’s CEO and President, Lee Hamilton, in a very interesting and informative interview on the company’s in-house monthly audio piece FSCast, confirmed that WAFRA had joined the FS team as its latest investor. Both Humanware and Freedom Scientific say that the companies will move forward under new ownership with no changes in management, mission, products, employees or locations.

I agree with the assessment that Jeff stated in Desert Skies yesterday that the community should accept the statements by Humanware and Freedom Scientific on face value and assume that the two most important players in the blindness business will either not change much or will improve as a result of new ownership. I personally found it refreshing to hear the generally publicity shy Dr. Hamilton discuss some of the more pressing issues facing the industry today.

I would also like to state that the fact that WAFRA, the new owners of Freedom Scientific, having Kuwaiti ownership should not change the opinion of the blind community toward Freedom Scientific or its new investors. Private investment firms, whether officially owned by domestic investors or by people abroad represent a global community where money, not borders, political or religious ideology reigns supreme. I think Americans today tend to have a bigoted, knee jerk reaction to anything involving the Arab world and Islamic people which, due to a small number of extremists, paints a huge portion of the world’s population with an unfortunate bias.

We should remember that patriotic Americans in the first Gulf War fought and died to help Kuwait maintain its independence for a reason – that Kuwait has, for a very long time, served as a voice of reason and a tremendous ally to the United States in a very difficult part of the world. If we look hard enough, I feel confident that, through the filter of American culture from the left, right and center of the political perspective that we can find fault with virtually every other nation, culture, belief system or whatever we choose to use as our scapegoat du jour.

Recently, the American media has chosen to show Islamic people and Mexicans in the most negative light. I can remember that it wasn’t that long ago when Americans screamed of how the Japanese had taken our jobs and were buying up American landmarks. Quite conveniently, the media has blamed Israel and Jewish people for all sorts of conspiracies with captains of industry, like Henry Ford writing anti-Semitic articles and funding Nazi like organizations in this country. Likewise, Italians, Irish, Catholics of all kinds who now are viewed as the backbone of American culture received terrible treatment and even highly respected towers of higher learning like Stanford University published eugenic articles that “scientifically” demonstrated the racial inferiority of Mediterranean people.

So, if you want to criticize Freedom Scientific, something I’ve been known to do from time to time, please do so based on grounds other than the ethnicity, religion or national origin of the people who own WAFRA. To do anything else comes from some of the ugliest parts of American culture – an aspect of our social system that breeds membership in the KKK, neo-Nazi groups and other organizations that, in my opinion, have nothing valid to add in a free society.

Of course, to demonstrate that I do not subscribe entirely to a politically correct liberal notion of the world I will ask, purely as a joke, will the Kuwaiti ownership of Freedom Scientific require that all guide dogs, because Islam claims that dogs are dirty, be removed from the building during visits to the FS headquarters in St. Petersburg? Ok, I suppose that Blogger will need to fire me from my multi-million dollar contract I have for writing BC as I have made a tasteless, ignorant and racially charged joke in a public forum.

Afterward

Either today or tomorrow, I will install the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade I got from the T-Mobile web site on my Dash Smartphone. This apparently requires sighted assistance so my wife will have to help out. I will then install the new beta of Mobile Speak Smartphone and give the new system a run.

From reading the T-Mobile web site and a handful of other things about WM6, I have learned that the Smartphone edition now contains the Mobile versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel and may include Microsoft Voice Command as well (Voice Command is definitely in the PDA version but I’m not sure about the Smartphone edition of the OS upgrade). With all of this included, a very cool Smartphone which, for the Moto Cue, are running at under $100, along with MSS and, depending upon your usage needs, perhaps a Blue Tooth keyboard, Braille display or headset definitely provides the most portable and cost effective handheld solution for the blink on the go today.

Look forward to a review of the latest Mobile Speak Smartphone and Windows Mobile 6 in the coming days here in Blind Confidential.

I just started to spell check this article before posting it. This is the first time that I’ve written FSCast in a Blind Confidential so I hadn’t yet added it to my Word spelling dictionary. I must admit that I smiled when the name of Freedom Scientific’s corporate controlled bit of pseudo-journalism (propaganda), caused the MS Word spell checker to offer “fascist” as its replacement. I do think that FSCast provides a good service and a fair amount of useful information but I wish FS would let more objective journalists do more in depth interviews in a far less tightly controlled manner.

— End

In the past day, Blind Confidential has received a lot more information about the Freedom Scientific acquisition by New York based and Kuwaiti owned Wafra Investment Group. A lot of the new information also falls into the category of hearsay but one particular item, the google cached pages from the WAFRA containing an announcement of the acquisition seems to add a lot of credibility to the rumors.

The following comes from the google cache of the WAFRA web page. The announcement, originally posted on April 25 has, without explanation, been removed from the web site:

Wafra Partners Announces Acquisition of Freedom Scientific, Inc.
April 25, 2007

Wafra Partners LLC and Wafra Investment Advisory Group, Inc.* are pleased to announce the acquisition of Freedom Scientific, Inc.

Freedom Scientific, Inc., based in St. Petersburg, FL, is the leading worldwide provider of assistive technology products for those who are low vision
or blind. Assistive technology products make information, whether in electronic or print format, and computing accessible to those who are low vision or
blind. The Company’s software products include screen reading software, screen magnification software and scanning and reading software. Hardware products
include handheld computers, Braille displays, scanning and reading machines, video magnifiers and Braille printers.

Wafra Partners LLC is a private equity firm focused on middle market companies based in North America that have enterprise values between $20 and $150
million. We are currently seeking acquisitions of companies in consumer products, outsourced business services, niche manufacturing, and consumer-driven
services.

* Wafra Investment Advisory Group, Inc. serves as investment advisor to the investments referred to herein. Wafra Partners LLC seeks companies within the
parameters and sectors set out above.

Blind Confidential has not contacted any FS employees as I do not want to jeopardize any of my old friends professional situations by asking them to provide information that FS asked them to keep secret. My sources, however, have contacted a number of people within FS. Freedom managers seem to be saying, “FS is a privately held company and ownership information or any acquisition details do not need to be disclosed.” When asked about WAFRA, one FS manager is said to have replied, “I don’t know anything about that.”

Communication with the FS rank and file has resulted in people telling BC sources, “we were brought into an ‘All Hands’ meeting and told that the company had been sold,” but no Freedom personnel is saying to whom the company may have been sold and details like the selling price remain undisclosed. Some FS employees have grumbled that their stock options turned out to be worthless but no one seems to know the threshold above which the company had to sell in order for the employees to make some money on the deal.

I have received a number of phone calls and emails from people worried about FS falling into the hands of a Middle Eastern government. I do not share these worries as I have witnessed the great work done by the Kuwaiti government in non-denominational altruistic pursuits around the world over they years. While not perfect, Kuwait is among the more free nations in the area and has been a terrific ally of the US over they years.

So, why the secrecy? Why did WAFRA post the acquisition announcement only to pull it down a few days later? Did the deal fall through? If so, why haven’t the employees been told?

It’s my opinion that secrecy tends to lead to the worst kind of paranoid, conspiracy ridden sort of conjecture that our community, an intensely closed circle of gossips, nutcases (include me in this group) and people with little more to do than guess what the maker of JAWS, the world’s most important product used by blind people, is up to?

All I can say is that I wish FS the greatest possible future no matter who owns the business but I must admit that my curiosity has been raised by the cloak and dagger intrigue surrounding the alleged sale of Freedom.

— End

It seems as though the AI^2 sale to investment bankers was not at all an isolated incident but, rather, the kick-off to a trend in major ownership changes in the blindness business. Recently, through Blind News (see link above) we’ve all read about the sale of Humanware to investors down under for an estimated $35 million but, over the weekend, the word around the campfire suggested to BC that a Kuwaiti firm called WAFRA acquired Freedom Scientific for an unknown price.

A google search for WAFRA came up with a page titled, “Wafra Investment Advisory Group, Inc.,” which describes the firm as being located in New York, having 35 employees, approximately $4 billion in assets under its management and that its owned by “The Public Institution for Social Security of Kuwait.” Poking around the WAFRA web site (which seems mostly accessible but does have some unlabeled navigation links on its pages) doesn’t suggest much about why it would find an AT company interesting as its investments seem highly diverse.

Most everything in Kuwait seems to have some attachment to the government so it’s no surprise that WAFRA is attached to a Kuwaiti government agency. I don’t know a lot about Kuwaiti investments but the Kuwait Fund, set up by the government to comply with Islamic law that requires charitable activities, spends a tremendous amount in altruistic ways throughout the world. Kuwait is a very wealthy nation and may find access technology to be an interesting component of a future for its socially conscious investments.

Of course, all of this still falls in the category of rumor. I don’t know who my sources got this information from and, as far as I actually know, FS may not have changed hands at all, there may not be any Kuwaiti investors involved and I may be printing a retraction later in the week. For now, all of my information remains in the category of “they said…” and all of my information has come purely in a verbal form from people who enjoy the gossip from around the industry.

Are these acquisitions good for the consumers? My opinion doesn’t really matter as it does not have any actual effect on outcomes. I’m neither a high roller investor nor an entrepreneur with a company to sell so I’m largely uncertain of how all of this will shake out in the coming years.

The AI^2 acquisition occurred too recently to use as much of a model for the future. The only new thing I’ve heard about new directions up in Vermont is that AI will be entering the hardware biz with its own CCTV sometime soon. This is also purely rumor and I’ve not verified its validity beyond simple hearsay. Of course, if true, I wonder why the world needs yet another CCTV? It seems like such 1985 technology.

The conglomeration of mergers and acquisitions that formed what we now call Humanware doesn’t seem to have had too great an effect on consumers. Humanware products don’t seem to have suffered, their prices seem similar and their overall approach to the market hasn’t, in my opinion, changed tremendously. Of course, I am only a distant observer of HW and have no practical experience with any of its products or services.

The three way merger that formed Freedom Scientific has brought the Florida company a much more international approach to doing business and many blind people who speak many different languages have benefited from JAWS expansion into far more corners of the world than would have been possible during the Henter-Joyce days. I also believe strongly that FS hardware has taken huge steps forward when compared with the tremendously stale products that Blazie was selling at the time of the merger.

I’ve criticized the entire blindness business for generally exhibiting a lack of creativity and innovation during the past few years but my readers should know that I work in the world of research where we do have desired outcomes but innovation and discovery trump virtually any business considerations. My series of failed start-ups likely results from a lack of practical business considerations showing up in my personal set of priorities and, therefore, I’m not likely the right person to ask about such decisions. While I think a lot of very cool things have occurred in the open source AT world, the commercial offerings from the AT industry remains far ahead of anything available for free.

So, if the rumors turn out to be unsubstantiated, remember, I told you that I got the information off of the AT gossip grapevine and the only reason I wrote about them here is to amuse myself and my readers with a maybe scenario.

Afterward

Since Blind Confidential started, I have employed the “Blogger for Word” button bar plug in. This handy utility worked great in that it let me compose my posts in MS Word and simply hit the “Publish” button to shoot the text off to Blogger. When I wrote the “Passage to Newark” piece on Friday, I tried to post it but Blogger rejected me. I went to the web interface and learned that I had to switch to the new version of Blogger. To do so, I had to create a google account (I might just have been the last person in the free world not to have one already) and log in to the new Blogger.

To my chagrin, I have learned that the nice Word plug in doesn’t work with the new Blogger and, according to the help file on google, they have no plans on updating it. I’m not sure how other people who use JAWS (or other screen readers for that matter) find the Blogger web interface but I find that some controls read incorrectly and that I had to do a bit of guesswork to figure out where to put the text. I understand that google has been working on accessibility and I hope they improve the blogger pages soon. Until then, I ask that they please give us the Word button bar back as virtually all screen readers do a decent job in Word and, for me at least, it presented the simplest way of doing a blog.

–End

I make no secret that my visits to India have turned me into something of an Indophile. I don’t think I want to live in the subcontinent on a permanent basis but, if given the right situation, I would enjoy taking a long stay there to further my understanding of the nation, its long history, its languages, its music, dance and arts, its culture, people and, of course, it’s many different cuisines. The trip to India from which I returned home on April 30 lasted only eight days but I took the opportunity to enjoy as many things new to me than ever before.

My plane arrived in New Delhi a little early from its scheduled arrival of 8:30 on a Sunday night. The Continental crew in New Delhi put me into a wheelchair, I had lost any energy to object, and they rolled me first through customs where a bureaucrat grunted and hit my passport with a rubber stamp. We then proceeded to baggage claim where my guide quickly found my suitcase (it’s easy to distinguish as it has a Hawaiian floral print on it) and we rolled out to the area where people can meet those of us arriving in New Delhi.

“Just look for the prettiest woman in the airport,” I told my guide as a way to find my friend. He laughed and we rolled out into the crowd. “Chris! Over hear!” I heard a familiar voice yell and I pointed in the direction of the voice. My guide rolled me to my friends and we gave him some money and headed out to the car. My friends laughed at how silly and angry I looked seated in the wheelchair with my carry-on on my lap.

We got into my friend’s car and drove to the Crown Plaza where I would stay for the coming week. In the car we chatted and caught up on things we’ve done since my last visit two and a half years ago. Upon arriving in the hotel, I checked in and we went to my room where I would change my clothes for the first time in forty eight hours, wash my face and head down to the restaurant for a late night dinner. The hotel restaurant’s fare impressed me and I enjoyed it much more than I generally found the food in western owned hotels. My Indian friend also enjoyed the food so I accepted that it must be reasonably authentic. I returned to my room, put BBC on the television and tried to sleep.

An American watching any of the English language news programs in India, especially those from the same brands we see in the US (CNN, MSNBC, Fox/NewsCorp etc.) immediately notices that the international versions use profoundly less sensationalist headlines and much more subdued music. When the George Tennet book story broke, the coverage in the Indian versions of CNN and MSNBC had virtually no people yelling from the left or right but, rather, the presentation gave the former CIA director his say, provided the viewer with the White House response and a few statements from others in Washington from both parties. The analysis seemed far more rational than the screaming white men we get on the same brands of news here in the states. I cannot tell you why the great difference.

On Monday, I met a friend for breakfast and set out to do the business which had paid for my trip to India. I went to some meetings and ate a very expensive and dumbed down meal at the Intercontinental which had definitely been designed for western travelers who prefer avoiding local culture as much as possible. In the afternoon, a friend asked me if I felt more adventurous this trip than before and if I wanted to try sampling the delights sold in road side stands. I did very much want to expand my horizons and agreed to try some “street food” this trip.

Our first stop brought us to a chae stand where we enjoyed what was likely the most delicious cup of tea I had ever had at a road side stand. This chae cost ten rupees (25 cents) for two cups and completely pleased the palette. We made a point of enjoying afternoon tea in the car every day for the remainder of the trip.

On Tuesday, a young woman friend of mine invited me to her Indian classical dance class. I sat on a comfortable cushion in the front of the room, not far from the dance guru who sang and played percussion while barking orders to the young ladies in the class, while imagining myself a Mogul king in his harem while twenty young women danced and sang purely for my pleasure. I enjoyed the interesting time signatures used in Indian classical dance while basking in the aroma of incense mixed with the sweet summer perspiration rising off of those who danced for my enjoyment. While the concept of an actual harem remained pure fantasy, the experience of the dance class will not soon be forgotten.

On Thursday, we went to a south Indian restaurant. Almost all Indian food we eat in the United States at various restaurants derives from northern Indian cuisines. These foods tend to contain a lot of butter, thick sauces and lots of spices. Food from South India surprised me in many ways. The spices remained distinct but had less of a burning effect. The dishes contained much more yogurt and had no meat. The combination of sweet, sour, spicy and the unique textures made me wonder how I had missed this cuisine until now. People in South India also enjoy very good coffee, reminiscent of that served in the Middle East and North Africa and I enjoyed the best cup of coffee I ever tasted in the subcontinent. Indians seem to believe that Americans prefer Nescafe over all other real coffees and, upon seeing a white face, try to insist on serving us the instant. I need to explain that I had gone native and prefer the local brew.

We toured museums and historical sites. I had never before heard of the Harappan civilization (circa 4000 BCE) and enjoyed the introduction to it provided in the Indian National Gallery.

This museum, at the heart of the Indian capital, had the strictest security detail I encountered while in New Delhi. The building was surrounded by Jersey barriers lined with young men carrying AK47 machine guns. Unlike most places in the US, India remains on the front lines in the battle against terrorism. Religious fanatics, Islamic, Hindu and other groups; political extremists of all kinds can easily cross the porous boarders from the wild west like Pakistan, Bangladesh and even Iran and sneak into India to cause havoc. While 911 was a huge tragedy in a single day, peaceful Indians live with the threat of bombings very often but manage to move on with life without much fear. While the signs of the Indian security system are visible in many prominent places, there is far less talk of fear than we have in the sensational US press.

The Indian National Gallery has many blind friendly exhibits. Much of the art is carved from stone and heavy woods and all but the most ancient and fragile items can be touched by visitors. So, as my friends read the descriptions and the history behind various items, I could explore them with my hands and get a good idea of their shapes and sizes.

Shopping in New Delhi for handicrafts still provides a lot of bargains on very interesting and quite beautiful items hand made in traditional manners. This trip, I brought back lovely handbags for my mother, my wife and a friend’s wife as well. I brought some brass ornaments depicting Hindu Gods and some wood carvings as well. I’m developing quite a collection of such objects.

So, as I sit in my Florida home far from the sights sounds and smells of India, I think back on another terrific trip there. I hope to return soon with my wife and stay for a longer period of time doing nothing more than learning the history and touring around a part of the world with 6000 years of civilization and some of the most interesting tastes, smells, sounds and sensations one can find on Earth.

Afterward

India also has lots of aspects that can only find a description in the unpleasant category. I really enjoy my visits there but will write a piece soon about some of the uncomfortable elements of spending time in New Delhi, including some truly horrible smells, poverty of a type we never experience in the west, heat up to 45 degrees C, dust storms and crowds that make New York and even Tokyo seem spacious.

Since returning home, I’ve spent most of my working time thinking about math and new presentation models for delivering methods to generate and manipulate equations for blind students. I would very much appreciate any ideas or pointers to articles that the BC readers can send me that might help inform my work.

I’ve also seen a demo this week of the most revolutionary innovation in AT that I’ve seen in a very long time. I can’t say much about it but it is super cool and will be hitting the streets soon.

–End

Blind Confidential has taken its longest break since we started writing it in the winter of 2006. Over the past month, I have found myself in a number of great cities far from home ranging from New York, the capital of the world, to New Delhi, the capital of the world’s largest democracy. Then, on May 1, I started a new and very interesting research job with City University of New York (CUNY) which has taken me back into a more structured way to spend my days and, as I’ve tried to learn a whole lot about our subject matter in a couple of weeks, Blind Confidential didn’t hit a point high enough on my priority stack so as to motivate me to do any actual writing. Finally, I’m struggling again with pain in my shoulders and hands resulting from the injuries suffered from “screen reader syndrome” so I have to dictate anything longer than a couple of sentences which makes writing far less fun than I usually find it.

My travels within the US fall into the fairly pedestrian so I won’t write much about them. I will say that the X-Dog did tremendously well while in New York. I felt a bit of apprehension bringing him there as I thought the noise and general chaos of Manhattan might cause him a lot of anxiety but, to the contrary, he strutted around like he owned the town. I’m now fairly convinced that the X-Guy has seriously metro sexual tendencies and that he, from his puppy raisers’ home in Texas to the guide dog school in Florida to our home in St. Petersburg had always secretly dreamed of going to New York where he could find other super hip dogs like himself and strut around enjoying the multicultural sounds and smells of the world’s greatest metropolis.

Xcelerator did not come with me to New Delhi. Instead, the terrific people at Southeastern Guide Dog School, from whence the X-Dude came, let him stay with them in their kennels. The greeting he gave me after we parted for ten days felt tremendous. I cannot quite describe the pure sense of unconditional acceptance that I felt as he did his “Snoopy dance” and proceeded to run back and forth through my legs in celebration of our reunion. The X-Guide didn’t care where I had been, he was ecstatic that we were back together and that was all that mattered. My special thanks go out to the great folks at Southeastern for caring for my big guy while I went to Asia and Sue to Boston.

The trip to India started out well enough. I went to Tampa/St. Petersburg International airport for the first leg of my trip, passed through security without a problem, got a sandwich and waited for my flight on Continental to Newark, the first leg of my journey. My flight boarded on time, I kissed Sue good bye, got on the plane and did my best to make myself comfortable. Our jet taxied out to the holding area and there we sat. After two hours of just sitting, I called Continental on my mobile phone and the customer service person told me that I had, indeed, missed my connecting non-stop flight to New Delhi. After another hour of sitting on the tarmac, our flight took off for Newark, New Jersey. Continental never offered us the opportunity to deplane so we could stay in Florida; once aboard, we had no choice but to go to lovely New Jersey.

Upon arriving in Newark, I picked up my carry-on bag and walked to the front of the plane. When I reached the exit, the Continental people told me that I had to ride in a wheelchair as that was the only way they could accommodate guiding me. “But there’s nothing wrong with my damned feet!” I protested to deaf ears who, in their most patronizing manner, responded by telling me to be calm and sit down. I asked for a valium, they didn’t accommodate my request.

In my wheelchair, a Continental employee brought me to their customer service room where they informed me that I would be spending the next 24 hours in Newark, New Jersey at the airport Howard Johnson’s. They gave me coupons for three meals, negotiable at any of the airport’s restaurants or at the hotel and then had my guide, a student from Kenya with terrific English skills and a very friendly demeanor, wheel me to the hotel shuttle bus without my luggage as that had already passed customs and could not be retrieved. Thus, I found myself without a toothbrush or change of clothing awaiting a bus to a hotel in Newark while I was supposed to be on my way to India.

When the shuttle bus arrived, I unfolded my cane and to really pile it on, the bungee cord that holds the aluminum stick together snapped and the two center pieces fell to the street. As the people around me helped me aboard the bus and handed me the parts to my cane, I sat down onto a nice, young African American woman who had boarded ahead of me. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“No problem,” she said as she slid over to the seat beside her, “Sit right down.”

The woman and I started chatting. “So, what can a blind person traveling alone without a cane do for 24 hours in Newark, New Jersey?” I asked.

“All I can tell you is to keep your valuables close to you and stay off the streets or a little white guy like you will get eaten alive,” she said with a laugh.

So, after checking in, I found myself alone with a cane I duct taped together in a hotel room in Newark with absolutely no place to go for roughly 24 hours. My flight to New Delhi, a non-stop scheduled for 8:40 pm the following night would not board until 8 pm and the nice people at the Newark Ho Jo told me that I had to check out by 2 pm. To recap, I found myself in Newark, New Jersey, compliments of Continental airlines with a handful of food coupons that could only be spent at restaurants I could not find on my own – at least I had Wi Fi in the room and room service could bring me a $30 bacon cheeseburger. I spent the night calling people on Skype (I had to tell the people meeting me at Indira Gandhi Airport that I would be a day late), eating my burger and watching CNN rehash the Virginia Tech shootings over and over. At least the Don Imus story had faded.

The following morning, I awoke to the sound of my cell phone ringing. I fumbled with it and said, “Hello?” I heard my father’s voice on the other end asking, “Chris?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“I just got off of the phone with the person in charge of disability issues at Continental. She’s going to call your cell phone in about fifteen minutes.”

Still somewhat asleep, “What?”

My dad repeated what he had said and then explained, “She said that everything you experienced was entirely against their official procedures.”

Waking, “I would hope so…”

“She’s arranged for you to spend the time after leaving your hotel in the first class lounge and Continental will provide you with someone to help you find food and such. She said you could call room service while in the hotel and that Continental will pay for it.”

A little while later, a very apologetic woman from Continental called me. She explained that they would have someone come gather me at 2 pm, the hotel check out time, and bring me to the airport. This didn’t happen, I waited for a while and then took the bus back. I found a Continental person at the airport and explained what the woman had told me. A guy named Joe from Continental came to greet me. He apologized for forgetting to pick me up and promised that everything would go smoothly after that and it sort of did.

Sitting around an airport, even in the first class lounge, for six hours is generally unpleasant. My afternoon in Newark was no exception. The people from Continental did provide me with as many plastic wrapped slices of cheese and plastic wrapped crackers to accompany them and as many glasses of diet Sprite as I could handle. They did get me to the plane on time and, fifteen hours after take off, they put me back into a wheelchair in New Delhi where I met my friends and, when I returned to the airport to come home, they clearly had the “Super Pain in the Ass” flag on my record as they bent over backward to provide me with the most polite and obsequious service I’ve ever received (through an extra security check for which I was flagged that required they go through all of my luggage by hand and, probably to satisfy someone who put me on some list, very politely confiscated my spare AAA batteries and cleared me for travel) albeit in a wheelchair the entire time. I still don’t understand the fixation Continental has with wheeled mobility but I definitely do not have the energy to investigate.

The flight to New Delhi was perhaps the most crowded I’ve ever experienced. Fortunately, I sat in an aisle seat as the Continental triple-seven sat 12 across and had the least personal space I’ve ever experienced on a long haul flight. I’m fairly certain that it must be the cheapest flight from the US to India as it was loaded with students, young people and families. My Bose Quiet Comfort, noise reduction headphones paid off once again and, accompanied by a couple of Ambien, I slept for the majority of the flight. The only odd point of the 15 hours in the air came when Monsi, a lovely young Indian banker seated by the window fell into my lap while trying to go to the bathroom without waking me. I will never complain about lovely young women falling into my lap.

Afterward

Thanks to all of you who have written to tell me that you missed BC. I’m glad to be writing again. The next installment will be about the time I spent in India this time which was the most interesting of my trips to the subcontinent as I was able to explore a number of historical sites and go to museums and such that I had never seen before. I also tried out some very new foods and beverages and had a wonderful time visiting old friends and their families.

–End

Continuing in my search for a mainstream GPS solution, I started looking into freeware, shareware and other very low cost solutions.  To begin with, programs selling for a few bucks or distributed freely likely cannot include a speech synthesizer as Microsoft SAPI support on Windows Mobile devices is incomplete and, at least through WM5 MS does not include a synthesizer.  

Thus, a $30 product, like VITO SmartMap from Vito Technologies has no value for a blind user as it has a purely visual display.  Interestingly, Vito SmartMap uses all vector graphics for its mapping solutions and sells maps of entire continents for $4 per continent.  I have no idea how complete the maps from Vito are but starting with a set of vector maps would make conversion to SVG far easier than with bitmaps which, in turn, can be rendered as a tactile map on a View Plus Tiger or other embosser.  To this end, I sent an email to Vito Technology to see if we might be able to gain access to their maps to use as the data for a tactile map project that someone might like doing.

The next stop on my search for an off-the-shelf solution brought me to a list of 17 Freeware GPS Solutions for Windows Mobile Smartphone.  The link I provide brings you directly to the Windows Mobile Smartphone GPS page.  This site, however, has literally thousands of programs in dozens of different categories for portable devices, including WM 2003, WM5, WM6 (although I don’t know of any WM6 devices for sale yet) and Symbian.  I will be revisiting this site to find more programs that work with Mobile Speak Smartphone but anyone who has a WM or Symbian device (including PAC Mate) with a screen reader installed should check out this site if you want to find all sorts of stuff that might work for you.

As I explored the site further, though, I learned that they actually have 3 GPS programs listed and about 14 or 15 other Smartphone applications that somehow got miscategorized into the GPS section.  I didn’t look at the process one goes through to list a product on this site so I don’t know why GPS came up with so many false positives.  The bulk of the programs that do not deal with global positioning systems do seem to have something to do with health and/or fitness so maybe there exists another meaning for GPS?

None of the GPS programs I found on this site seem suitable for use by a blind person.  

The first GPS program on the list, however, is called PerDiemCo Location and Tracking.  This program does not provide navigation or mapping instructions at all but, rather, lets you keep others informed of your exact location.  While I don’t think this has much value for a blind user (I didn’t test it for accessibility either), it may serve a good purpose for elders with dementia and others with cognitive impairments who may get lost or badly confused from time to time.  

Oddly, as I searched in the GPS category, I did find that some of the health and fitness programs might interest a blind user.  I haven’t tested any of these for accessibility but the list does include a few programs designed for diabetics which our readers should know has a large cross over with people with vision impairment.  I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has tried these programs with a screen reader on a mobile device and how well they work.

Thus, my search for a GPS solution that I can use on my WM5 Smartphone seems to have come up empty.  None of the open source GPS programs run on WM5 Smartphone devices so I can’t simply tweak something into working under 5 mph.  

I will now broaden my search to include standard Windows Mobile 5 devices like an iPAQ and, if I have time, I’ll try out some WM 2003 programs also on an iPAQ I have available to me.  

There is an open source Symbian GPS solution designed for blind users called Loadstone.  I might dust off my Nokia 6600 to give it a test drive.  I have heard anecdotally that the maps used by Loadstone come from the US Census Department and contain huge missing pieces of some areas.  There are a few online, “open source” map databases that volunteers fill in with data as they discover empty patches.  For people who live in places where these databases have pretty solid maps, they could provide a low cost mapping solution.  

If someone wanted to build a web server side GPS navigation solution for blind users, google maps provides a very solid API but, even for users who have unlimited data packages on their cell phones, google might be a difficult solution for making an application that runs on the handset as I haven’t found SOAP wrappers for google maps which would mean someone would need to perform the tedious task of generating such.

So, why do the otherwise accessible GPS solutions contain the 5 mph minimum speed for positional accuracy?

Virtually none of the GPS solutions I tested seem to pay attention to WAAS encoding.  WAAS provides much more accurate positional information than does traditional GPS.  WAAS, however, has a few major problems.  First, the WAAS system only exists over the United States, a bit of Southern Canada and Northern Mexico.  Thus, any GPS software vendor who wants to sell their products internationally cannot rely on this system.  Secondly, even in the US, a system cannot always count on the availability of WAAS signals as the US government can optionally turn the system off for national security purposes.  

WAAS, when it is available, consistently provides 1 meter accuracy.  This is good enough for a pedestrian who is paying attention to his whereabouts.  Standard NMEA GPS can, if enough satellites can be found by the receiver and there is little distortion in the satellite signals (tall buildings, mountains, canyons, thick cloud cover can all distort signals) also provide 1-2 meter accuracy but, unless the user is on water or in the middle of a field on a sunny day, such perfection rarely exists.

Most map data is also far less detailed than GPS, with or without WAAS, is accurate.  For instance, a map data source like Microsoft’s MapPoint (one of the very best) contains the GPS points of every intersection in its coverage areas but addresses in the middle of a block are calculated through interpolation.  So, when I wrote some test code for an open source GPS program that I may release that I’m currently calling “Freeway GPS” that used Microsoft’s MapPoint as its data source, I would get four addresses returned through the MapPoint SOAP interface when standing in my own front yard.  Using various heuristics, like calculating the distance from my exact GPS point to that of each of the addresses returned, my program could fairly well guess which address was closest to my actual location.  Unfortunately, because the addresses are calculated through interpolation, it was impossible to get my actual address and, often, the result would be a address that didn’t actually exist but, rather, stood between two real homes.  

For a map database to be truly accurate to every specific address, it would need to contain a bounding box for every separate address in its coverage area.  Thus, every spot in the map would require a polygon with at least four vertices into which one would need to calculate whether or not a GPS point falls.  This would be both processor intense and require an enormous amount of data on the server.  In turn, the extra processing and database hits would slow the system down to a point that anything moving even as fast as a bicycle might be well past the location reported.  As, to make any real money, GPS systems must work for motorists, rapid response is essential.

For these technical and economic reasons plus the lack of reliability in the WAAS system, truly pedestrian friendly GPS programs may still be left to the AT companies and the high priced AT market as leveraging the extra effort would be difficult to justify for a mainstream company.

Afterward

I don’t understand the science of attention well enough to comment on the ideas that Will Pearson posted yesterday.  Even if I am distracted by a speech system, I still think I would like a GPS navigation program that I could easily carry with me.  I’ll pay extra hard attention not to walk into obstacles while listening to directions from the software.

J. J. posted a link to another GPS program for Windows Mobile 5.  As it does not have a Smartphone edition, I will take a look at it when I start to survey PDA solutions along with Mobile Speak Pocket.

— End