We are especially interested in recruiting folks who can work on the technical teams, including:

• Symbian client (Python)
• Android client (Java)
• Web server (Ruby on Rails)
• Bluetooth and GPS team (Some subset of Python, Java, C++, and not afraid of hardware)

The feature was aired on the Big Ten Network and is now available online in the University of Michigan’s iTunes U under Campus > Out Of The Blue >  Episode 7 Talking-Points.

You can also view the video directly under this URL: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/FeedEnclosure/umich-public.1883904095.01883904099.2317287716/enclosure.mp4

Enjoy, and let us know how you liked it.

expoSItion is an annual event where Master’s and doctoral students at the University of Michigan, School of Information are invited to showcase their work.  This year, the showcase took place on March 23rd at the Michigan League, where a total of 25 projects were presented.

This year, the design team and the development team spent a lot of time preparing for the expoSItion.  The design team completed the interaction map and designed the poster for the presentation.  The development team worked to make sure that the basic TP prototype was working.  During the expoSItion, we attracted alot of audience, especially the prospective students.  Some of the prospective students expressed special interests in joining the team next term.  Some of the companies that attended the SI career fair also showed great interest in our project.

We believe that Talking Points received great deal of exposure at the expoSItion.  We were successful in showing how much potential our project has in transforming the daily lives of the blind community.

We hope to continue on success with passion and energy to help our project grow and transform into a successful collaboration.

On other fronts, I have also written three separate proposals and sent them to Google. One was to Google.org, another one was to the Google office in Ann Arbor and the last one was aptly sent to Google’s Boston branch, which among other things is considered the hub for Android based mobile apps!!!  I cross my fingers and hope for the best on my proposal.

Lastly, I have also entered Talking Points into a business plan competition with Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest, a Michigan based business that pairs  aspiring entrepreneurs with serial ones.  The cool aspect about the GLEQ Business Plan Competition is that entrepreneurs are matched with a business coach to advise them through the competition. Plans are due May 15 and cash awards will be presented on June 11 in Lansing.  So, Dan and I are now hitched, hopefully with some great advice from the Tech community here in Ann arbor.  I am of course hoping that we are lucky enough to work with someone who has an assistive technology background.  Which allows me to segue into my last point pertaining to blind individuals in America.

The following information is according to the American Foundation For The Blind:

Q: What constitutes a legally blind person:

Answer: those who have a central visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better eye with the best possible correction, or a visual field of 20 degrees or less.

Q: How many adults with vision loss in the U.S. use computers?

At least 1.5 million Americans with vision loss use computers.

Q:  What percentage of legally blind children attend residential schools for the blind?

According to the 2007 Annual Report from the American Printing House for the Blind, approximately 9% of legally blind children attend residential schools for the blind. Of the 57,696 children who are legally blind, 83% (48,080) were registered by state departments of education, 9% (5,085) were registered by residential schools for the blind, 5% (2,791) were registered by rehabilitation programs, and 3% (1,740) were registered by multiple disability programs.

Q: Looking at different racial and ethnic groups, how many Americans have vision loss?

Approximately 20.9 million Americans who have vision loss indicated one race and 319,000 indicated two or more races. Of those who indicated one race, 17.5 million are white, 2.5 million are black or African American, 2.3 million are Hispanic or Latino, 580,000 are Asian, and 274,000 are American Indian or Alaska Native.

Q: How many people with vision loss live in a large metropolitan statistical area (MSA) with a population size of 1,000,000 or more?

Approximately 9.2 million people who have vision loss live in a large MSA. There are approximately 7.5 million people with vision loss living in a small MSA with a population size of less than 1,000,000. Of the people with vision loss in the U.S., 4.5 million do not live in an MSA.

Q: How many people with vision loss live in each of the particular geographic regions of the U.S.?

Approximately 2.9 million people with vision loss live in the Northeast, 5.5 million live in the Midwest, 8.5 million live in the South, and 4.3 million live in the West.

Q:  How many people with vision loss in the U.S. have a family income of less than $20,000?

Approximately 5.7 million people with vision loss in the U.S. have a family income of less than $20,000. There are approximately 14.6 million people with vision loss in the U.S. that have a family income of $20,000 or more.

Q:  How much schooling have Americans with vision loss received?

Of Americans who have vision loss and are 25 years of age and over, 4.5 million have less than a high school diploma, 6.0 million have a high school diploma or a GED, 5.4 million have some college education, and 3.6 million have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Q:  How many older Americans have vision loss?

There are approximately 6.2 million seniors (65 years of age and over) who have vision loss. There are approximately 9 million Americans 45 to 64 years of age who have vision loss. As the 9 million baby boomers with vision loss continue to age, the number of seniors with vision loss will continue to grow substantially.

Q: How many Americans who have vision loss are married?

Approximately 11.3 million of Americans who have vision loss are married, 2.3 million are widowed, 3.4 million are divorced or separated, 3.1 million have never married, and 1.1 million live with a partner.

For more information: http://www.afb.org/default.asp

We have conducted four interviews with individuals who are either blind or visually impaired.  Based on our interviews, we have created two personas and two scenarios.  The two personas include users who are blind and visually impaired.  For the two scenarios, we have envisioned of how our two characters would complete the tasks: 1. finding a meeting room inside a building and  2. searching for a decent place to eat for lunch.

Based on the results from our end-user research, we have created a lo-fi interaction map.  We have first created a basic hierarchy of the application on the white board and later transferred the revised version in OmniGraffle.  We have also compared the keypad structure of various Symbian supported cellphones so that we can assign intuitive key commands for the users to input.

Currently, we are consolidating the final UI map.

With the above in mind, I have been courting a few key people at Nokia and asking for their help not only in terms of development but in the simple donation of equipment.  Unfortunately, this has not been as simple and straight forward as I thought it would be.  I have to say that I think matters have become alot more complicated since the economy really took a nose dive and MNC’s(multi national corps) such as Msoft,Google and Nokia have had to lay employees off (unheard of prior to this economic debacle) and have had lower than expected 1st quarter earnings.  I have been hard at work trying to go after the Director of Nokia’s Forum.  This is an open source division of Nokia that works,helps, assists developers building applications on Symbian.  I thought this would be a shoe-in but I am not even getting a call back.  This is very puzzling to me.  Nonetheless, I am trying other avenues as well.  Furthermore, if this wasn’t frustrating enough, I recently found out that Nokia laid off many individuals in the NY offices where I interned over the summer.  So, some of the contacts that I had are no longer there and the contacts that they have referred me to may have suffered the same fate.  However, it has been very difficult confirming this information because no one really knows anything just yet.  So, until the dust settles I have to begin trying other avenues not only within Nokia but also Google since we are simultaneously developing on Android.

As with everything in biz dev, sales and mktg. you must always put it into perspective and know that this is a line of work that is highly unpredictable.  This is what I love about it.  Its unpredictability factor is what makes you keep pushing and pushing until that ray of light makes itself known to you.  And Talking Points is no different.  We will get there. We are getting there…..

We chose Android rather than iPhone due to reasons such as the team’s preference on the Java programming language, lack of iPhone app developing environment (iPhone SDK can only run on Macs), the G1 phone keyboard, and other cool features of G1 phone like its integrated compass, etc. These features are important for implementation of some of our ideas, e.g. use the compass to tell the user which direction they are facing.

Features that we want to implement include GUI and SUI, compass, bluetooth, and user contributed database. We are also looking forward to improve the SUI according to existing HCI research. Due to the fact that we lack hands on experience with Android app developing, we plan to start from the basic things. Jakob also suggested us to switch from bluetooth to GPS because it is easier to do. We are still at the stage of planning what we want to include to make the project doable within the tight schedule of this semester. So, suggestions are always welcomed!

Photo credit by Nokia

We, the Sybmian development team now have a test device, a Nokia N95 running Symbian S60 3rd Edition, in our possession and we have started developing the prototype for this platform.

From talking to blind users we learn that pretty much every blind smartphone user has a screen reader software installed on their phone. Therefore we decided that a high priority for our Talking-Points system will be to play nice with common screen readers. Thanks to the generosity of Code Factory, a developer of mobile accessibility tools for the vision-impaired, we now have Mobile Speak running on the test device. We haven’t completely decided whether we should use the screen reading software for all the speech output, which would just mean graphically presenting the information on the display and letting the screen reader read it aloud, or creating our own speech output while making sure that the screen reader does not interfere in the meantime.  If you have any input on this issue, please let us know!

Besides that we’ve divided up the programming duties and are ready to commence actual code development. An idea that we’ve had floating around since last year is to use the near-ubiquitous GPS receivers of modern phones to augment the Bluetooth beacon detection from our previous prototype. Some POIs (points of interest) would have GPS coordinates associated with them, in in place of or in addition to a Bluetooth MAC address. A phone running Talking-Points would then be able to send its current coordinates to the remote database, and get a list of nearby POIs. How close a POI would need to be to qualify as “nearby” has yet to be determined, but we expect it to be someting like a mile radius. After receiving this list, Talking-Points would periodically check if it has come within a certain distance of one of these POIs, and trigger a full query of the remote database if the user is near enough to one. This distance has to be yet determined as well. It would also check the total distance traveled from the point of the initial query, and get a new list of nearby POIs if the user has moved far enough. The specifics of this system will probably take shape over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we have a general idea of how it will function in the finished product.

Stay tuned to hear something about the first prototype test runs within the next couple of weeks,

Your Talking-Points Symbian Development Team

More specifically we chose Python for S60 (aka PyS60) because it allows very easy rapid prototyping on a mobile device.  Other mobile development environments often have a very steep learning curve and this is very simple in comparison.

The primary goal will be to first implement all the functionality of  the current proof-of-concept prototype.  These include:

• Bluetooth location detection
• Receiving location information through an RESTful HTTP API from our online location database
• Displaying location information through an audio output interface

In addition to that we are planning to implement the following new/changed features:

• Location detection through GPS
• Keypad navigation instead for voice commands (voice recognition on a mobile device is hard to get right)

Our design team is also actively working on new interesting features and coming up with a more usable interaction design.

If you have any feedback or suggestions concerning the implementation of Talking-Points using PyS6o, please let us know!

Some questions that we will discuss very likely include:

• How can technology help visually impaired and sighted individuals with urban orientation?
• What kind of technologies do visually impaired people currently use?
• What kind of information are people interested in when walking around a city?
• What are the most interesting new mobile development platforms and how accessible are they?
• How can a system like Talking-Points be deployed so that it is financially viable, but still affordable for the individual?

But we can also discuss about what you always wanted to talk about that is connected to the ideas behind Talking-Points.

We are trying to make this event as informal and as pleasant as possible, so food and drinks will be cared for.

Details about the individual things that will happen in the time between 1 and 6pm will be posted here before the event.

How to get there?
The Design Lab-1 is located in the center of the first floor of the Duderstadt Center on North Campus.

We are looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday!