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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:Click And Go Wayfinding Maps
Joe Cioffi, CEO of Click and Go Wayfinding Maps | www.clickandgomaps.com
Behind Facebook’s efforts to make its site accessible to all http://buff.ly/29NxI5X
ATU259 – Facebook Accessibility – Assistive Technology at Easter Seals Crossroads http://buff.ly/29NxtHW
App: Mindfulness for Children www.BridgingApps.org
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JOE CIOFFI: Hi, this is Joe Cioffi. I’m the CEO of Click and Go Wayfinding Maps, and this is your Assistance Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Welcome to episode number 269 of Assistive Technology Update, scheduled to be released on July 22, 2016.
I hang out today with Joe Cioffi of Click and Go Wayfinding, talk about what they’re doing over there. I have a story about Facebook accessibility and then also enough about mindfulness for children from our partners over at BridgingApps.
We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project, or leave us a call on our listener line. That number is 317-721-7124.
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I always love it when assistive technology shows up in the mainstream media. There is a really great article at Engadget right now that was written by Nicole Lee that’s titled “Behind Facebook’s efforts to make its site accessible to all”. And what they do is they spent some time reporting on activity of Jeff Weiland who has been heading up Facebook accessibility for about five years ago. It talks about what that team has been doing, everything from automatic alt text which takes pictures on Facebook and does its best to give it alt tags to be read by screen readers. They talk about their empathy lab which will help developers get deep into the experience of using accessible technology and assistive technology. They also talk about the fact that Facebook videos now can be captioned and they’re working on automatic captioning for the videos. It really does a good job of diving pretty deeply into what Facebook is doing and also gets some input from others like Krista Earl over at the American Foundation for the Blind who talks about the importance of accessibility.
They spend a little bit of time talking about a fairly new initiative that’s called Teach Access, and its partnership between Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and IBM to create a Github of information on how to teach web accessibility and make it free and available to anybody who wants to include that in their curriculum. You know, Facebook obviously ton, and obviously I’m someone who spends a lot of time on Facebook as well. I’m always impressed when I find out that companies like Facebook are doing things for accessibility. This article is good.
I would also suggest, go back, and if you haven’t heard it, listen to our show episode number 259 of Assistive Technology Update — it was released in May 2016, not that long ago — where we spend the biggest part of our show talking with Matt King, who is one of the accessibility specialist there over at Facebook. We dive into their initiatives at a pretty deep level. Check our show notes and you will find a link to our episode number 259 where we interview Matt King and I will also pop a link in the show notes what to the Engadget article where you can read the information that Jeff Weiland shared about their accessibility efforts. Check our show notes.
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Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an App Worth Mentioning.
AMY BARRY: This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is an App Worth Mentioning. Today I am sharing Mindfulness for Children, meditations for kids app. This app is specifically designed to assist children learn how to be mindful through a series of guided meditations.
The app was developed by a psychomotor therapist and an app developer who believe that mindfulness meditation is a powerful tool for creating physical and mental stability that can help provide more inner peace and increased energy. We trialed mindfulness for children with a 15-year-old boy with Asperger’s’s syndrome and anxiety disorder, a 12-year-old boy with dual diagnoses of Down syndrome and a visual impairments, and a nine-year-old boy with an anxiety disorder. Though the creators of the app designed it to be with for children ages five years and older, we feel they can be used with children who have a cognitive age of four. As the designer’s point out, it is highly recommended and most helpful for younger children to practice together with an adult. Even the app icon itself that shows an image of an adult sitting next to a child underscores this idea of shared enjoyment, adult guidance, and time spent together.
We feel the app can be most beneficial for children with developmental delays, cognitive delays, ADHD, ADD, anxiety disorders, emotion disorders, learning disorders, and also sleep disorders. The app is organized into several sections with a brief summary on how to do mindfulness, a short description of each of the mindfulness meditations themselves, and what they are designed to do, and the meditations themselves. The meditations are divided into two sections with the first containing four meditations ranging in length from four minutes to 16 minutes. The second section contains four good night type of meditations of 24 minutes.
We really liked the pacing of the female voice who guides the meditations as all three children found it to be very comforting. We felt it was just the right pace even for those with significant processing challenges. We liked that within the guided meditations, the visualizations used language familiar to children that allowed even someone with a cognitive disability to understand and follow the instructions. Despite the children-targeted vocabulary, we felt it was not too babyish and would certainly be appropriate for older children and teens. We liked the low purple light as it was connected to quite time and did not have the blue light that can be too stimulating. We also appreciated how the app can play in the background. This feature can be especially important for those with motor impairments who may hit the home button accidentally when assistive touch is activated.
Once the app is used for the first time, and videos are downloaded, one does not need Wi-Fi to activate the meditations, making it great to transport two different environments. Mindfulness for Children is available at the iTunes Store for $1.99 and is compatible with iOS iOS devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
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WADE WINGLER: So we can get all kinds of access to information and entertainment and even social relationships online. I can go online and order a head of cabbage to show up to my house tonight it seems. But in the end, I feel like people really still need to and want to go places and want to get out and about. It’s part of our nature. I like to travel and those kinds of things. I think about that in terms of the context of assistive technology, and I remember many years ago I was in the parking lot at the Closing the Gap assistive technology conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and there were people walking around the parking lot with backpacks on their backs and computers in them and antennas on top of their backpacks experimenting with something called GPS or Global Positioning Systems in such a way that it would help people who were blind or visually impaired or had other kinds of disabilities navigate and get around outside. Everybody of course said, well, that stuff doesn’t work inside. But it is doing something interesting outside. That little trip down memory lane is what I wanted to say to introduce our topic today, because today I’m super thrilled to have Joe Cioffi on the line with us. He is the CEO of Click and Go Wayfinding Maps. We are going to talk about the state of the art in some navigation systems and wayfinding systems that are probably a little better having than the ones in the backpacks years ago in the parking lot in Minneapolis. Enough from me. Joe, are you still on the line there?
JOE CIOFFI: I’m here, yes.
BRIAN NORTON: Joe, thank you so much for being with us today. I’m exsighted about our conversation today and to learn what you guys are doing over at click and go.
JOE CIOFFI: Where would you like me to begin?
WADE WINGLER: Maybe we should start a little bit with you and your background and how you became interested in wayfinding and assistive technology.
JOE CIOFFI: It’s sort of a roundabout — it’s been quite an adventure. My background is deaf-blindness and cartography, but mainly deaf-blind education and orientation and mobility. Unlike the majority of mobility instructors — and for those who might be listening who don’t know what mobility instructors are — I assume most people do. Folks who study navigation and safety field for blind pedestrians, so teach that body of skills to blind adults and children. My focus was on deaf-blind adults and children. Working with that population in the absence of sound, you see how limited your understanding of the world is. If you ask any veteran blind hearing traveler how much they rely and depend upon sound, they’ll use superlatives. It is their god.
All of a sudden, working with travelers who were very smart. A lot of my students spoke multiple languages. I had students who were fluent in French and English and braille and American Sign Language. Yet they had no understanding of the world because they had no access to data. My interest in mapping and wayfinding really grew out of my interest in working with deaf-blind adults who wanted to travel. So I started making tactile maps which were really important but generally absent in the United States for a variety of reasons. None of them are good reasons. But we don’t have many tactile maps. I started to really large a tactile map business. Then over the last 10 years, I have become more exsighted about the new technologies that were available through smartphones, through satellite driven databases, but that were generally available to sighted folks. Today, most sighted folks are always in their smartphones to figure out where they are and where they want to go. Some of this technology was making it into the hands of blind folks, but none of it was making it into the hands of deaf-blind folks. So we created Click and Go really to be a service, a free service, that delivered customized narrative directions and descriptions for deaf-blind travelers. And very quickly we realized that we could easily tweak this for blind travelers, and we since tweaked it for wheelchair travelers and now sighted travelers and any number of user groups can usethis. So it took the opposite course of development compared to most technologies which may be trickled down to the death and deaf and blind world but usually don’t.
WADE WINGLER: That’s a fascinating background that I always enjoy hearing about AT folks who started with a real practical problem they were trying to solve by way of helping people with disabilities to be more independent. I salute your background and your motivation for doing this. When I looked around your website, I saw that you had sections for kiosks and navigation and maps and tactile maps and all those kinds of things. Maybe you can kind of walk me through the different products and services and those sections of the work that you do.
JOE CIOFFI: In fact, there are actually features that we delivered that are not even on the website yet. Let me go through them. The initial, the heart of our technology and service — all of our data is free for users, so we don’t charge any users for any of our data. So they are a route narrative. Imagine using Google pedestrian directions, it’s going to give you best of the visual directions. So if you pick from point A to point B, it might say walk 475 feet north — it will give you some direction that are generally not very helpful to non-sighted travellers. So our route directions include distance, time distance, textual information, audio information, other proprioceptive cues that blind travelers will really want to take advantage of and use for their own landmarking as they travel. So the first thing is route narratives.
Second, virtual tours. A lot of blind travelers will be familiar with this. If you have an O&M instructor show you how to get to a facility where you might have a job there, a meeting. But if you had a job there, you might not only get the route support to get to that destination, you get a virtual tour so you understand an overview of that destination. So we give descriptive virtual tours so you get an understanding of an entire area as well as a specific routes within that area. Next we give out intersection descriptions.
Another feature, and I think we are the only company that does this. We developed customized, low vision, high contrast maps for every narrative that we create. So if you have low vision, you can listen to an audio text narrative. You can also look at a high contrast map. That’s a big problem with Google because their maps are very low contrast and you can’t explore them visually if you have low vision.
Another feature we have are tactile maps. Our tactile maps are simultaneously tactile visual, but they are very clearly tactile. Every feature has a different texture. There is a map legend, etc. The kiosks that we have on our website, what we offer. We just did this for Columbia University about a year and half ago. They just purchase all of the really beautiful, high tech touchscreen kiosks. They have a blindness program, and they were a little concerned after they bought a kiosk that the kiosks were inaccessible. A lot of the new, most modern kiosks in airports and college campuses are these touchscreen devices that are completely inaccessible to blind users. So we offer a solution to venues that have these kiosks so that any sighted traveler can get all that data, and it is delivered to their phone. So we reformat all the data that is visually presented in the kiosk, and we make it available through a nap and we deliver it through personal smartphones.
Another feature that we have is iBeacons for messaging as a support to our navigation data. Those beacons will identify landmarks, construction, hazardous. They will provide specific support in real time that will aid in orientation. So if you are walking a route, it will give you on the spot some cues that will help you identify what you might be looking for in that particular area. So that’s sort of what we have on the website.
Our newest feature is something that we are just calling accessible signage. This is not wayfinding, but it is a use of iBeacons that takes static signage, your visual signage that’s up on college campuses, hotels, hospitals, and it turns that signage into audible signage. So if you are walking around, you’re going to hear every sign that the rest of us see. It’ll just be delivered to your headset, preferably you are wearing bone conduction headsets. That’s the latest thing we’re working on.
WADE WINGLER: It sounds like we’ve come a long way from wandering around in the parking lot with backpacks with computers on our backs.
JOE CIOFFI: Definitely. One of the problems with the services that are delivered only by smartphone is that, as we all know, a huge percentage of the disabled population is either underemployed or unemployed, and smartphones are expensive. So we’ve maintain a policy of delivering every — all of our data through low-tech portals in addition to the smartphones. You can use an old-fashioned IBR service and get all of the data that we have. It’s not as efficient because it just doesn’t do what Annette can do, but it’s all available through low-tech sources.
WADE WINGLER: That’s good. I love sort of the altruistic peace there about keeping the cost down and making it available on multiple platforms. Joe, we’ve kind of covered this a little bit, but we are talking primarily about accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired, or is it more than that?
JOE CIOFFI: It’s definitely more than that. When we first started this, we thought we are going to create some services for deaf-blind young adults and adults only. And then we realized, we can make this audio and then develop a database for blind travelers. And then we realized we can create accessible stair free routing for our wheelchair travelers. I used to do a lot of work in New York, and I remember at NYU, the disability service office was actually on a corner that didn’t have a curb cut, which was ironic. I was just thinking, I had a number of friends and colleagues who use wheelchairs. In the winter, if you’re going to a large building like a gymnasium, there might be only one accessible door. If you happen to be wheeling around in the wrong direction, you’re going to spend an extra 15 minutes out on an icy sidewalk and take it to the accessible door. We realize there is a need and this is about all confirmed for stair free routing for wheelchair travelers. A lot of sighted folks get lost, and they can use this service as well. So we create visual maps in addition to our customized maps. We found that multiple user groups are really happy to take advantage of this kind of service.
WADE WINGLER: Joe, obviously you are adding a lot of value here. Clarify for me who your customers are. Is it the individual who is going to use the solution? Is it a venue? Is it a municipality? Who are your customers?
JOE CIOFFI: Here’s our philosophy on this. We feel that access to wayfinding data is free for all of us said it folks, and it should be something that a blind individual have to pay for, nor should they get a lower quality map because it’s free. So we feel that this is a reasonable accommodation. What we do is we approach venues and we say, look, we can make your venue fully accessible from a wayfinding standpoint, and we’ll gather all the data, we will put together so that it’s very easily accessible for multiple user groups, and you pay us to do it. We’ll deliver it for you. This stuff, even if it’s required, I think unfortunately a lot of venues don’t do anything unless we are afraid of being sued. I never use that card, but I approach facilities that I know are interested in being as accessible and compliant as possible, and we’ve gotten really good feedback. I’ve been in the field for 35 years. I know a lot of different individuals that are in various positions. Our main priority is actually the transit and higher education environment. We feel that if a young blind adult or deaf-blind adult is going to make it, they’ve got to succeed in the higher Ed world, and that means they have to travel in that world, and then they got to be able to use transits comfortably, confidently, efficiently when they get out. So transit and higher Ed are our priorities, and we usually try to hit those venues and get them to come on board and become accessible for wayfinding.
WADE WINGLER: Is take a few seconds here and brag on some of the organizations that you’ve worked with. As do a little name dropping. Tell me where your technology is being used.
JOE CIOFFI: We are still relatively new. I pretty much started this company by myself as a deaf-blind specialist. A lot of these companies, if you go to the big conferences, 90 percent of these companies are owned by huge investors, venture capitalists. We are a small company with a small group of investors. Our clients have been government facilities — we’ve done the messages state house. I’ve done a subway station in Japan. We did the world blind Union in Bangkok. We’ve done a long list of universities in the US, Swarthmore College, Columbia, University of Minnesota, University of Colorado. We’ve done work with leader dog, Seeing Eye, Farouk college. We lost our first subway project in the US. Ironically we were invited to do a subway in Japan before we got to one in the US. We did our first subway in Washington DC a year and half ago. We just got approved to do seven more. We’ll be starting than a couple months. We are doing the Comcast headquarters in Philadelphia. That’ll be the first corporate tower to be accessible to the blind. We are working with New York City as an exclusive accessibility consultant to the city for blindness. We are now just about ready to roll out some projects for New York to show how city parks and petition plots can be accessible as well as the transit systems. So we’ve got some really exciting, large project in front of us. I’m looking forward to doing more.
WADE WINGLER: Joe, we are getting a little close on time here with the interview. Before we wrap this up, tell me a story. Tell me a story about someone whose life has been impacted by the word you’re doing.
JOE CIOFFI: I don’t know if I could come up with any kind of tearjerker story. Mainly, my work as a deaf-blind O&M instructor — I could come up with many of those. I think what’s been most useful and most satisfying to me is when I go to conferences and I run into — we don’t sell anything to blind individuals, but they use our services. We got such positive feedback from people that really feel this is going to change the way blind people can travel around the world. I think that has been the most satisfying part to me. I know that this works, it’s not only free but it’s high-quality, and it’s detailed. We compile the routes for every conceivable travel destination within our venues. Within the neighborhood of a subway station, every landmark above ground, every bus stop above ground, every entry point of the station, to every platform, to every transfer platform, every machine and kiosk and exit and back to the buses and back to the landmarks above ground, it’s really a complete wayfinding service. I’m sorry I can come up with anything more life-changing, but I don’t have anything to give you there.
WADE WINGLER: That’s okay because it sounds like the stories are in the making. I’ll throw a child out to our listeners because I guarantee that there are people in our listening audience to have edited from the click and go system. Listeners, call into our listener line and leave us some testimonials and let us know how the system is in working for you. Maybe we can pop those inches an upcoming episode. Joe, before we finish up here, how do people reach out to you? If they want to get in contact with you, learn more about what you are doing at click and go, how would they do that?
JOE CIOFFI: Our website is ClickandGoMaps.com. Our telephone number is 347-709-5549. We’d be happy to chat with anyone who’s interested, anybody who has any ideas. We are looking — people that advocate for this sort of thing at universities, it’s usually the community that can make this happen. You would encourage anybody who is interested in being involved as an advocate or just to learn more about click and go to reach out. We’d be happy to hear from you.
WADE WINGLER: Joe Cioffi is the CEO of click and go wayfinding maps and has been our guest today. Joe, thank you for being with us. We do things around me on. I appreciate it. Thank you.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124, shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. Looking for a transcript or show notes from today’s show? Head on over to www.EasterSealstech.com. Assistive Technology Update is a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. Find more shows like this plus much more over at AccessibilityChannel.com. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.