The Seeing Assistant Go app supports the spatial orientation of blind and visually impaired people. It provides information about the surroundings using synthetic speech, sounds, vibrations, and pointing in the direction of the top of the phone.
Useful when travelling, but also for getting to know the area of unfamiliar places you are about to visit.
Details
- Are you travelling by bus and want to know which stop it has just stopped at or how far it is to the one you want to get off at?
- Which streets is the taxi taking you down?
- Where is the nearest grocery shop to the guesthouse where you are going to spend your holiday?
- Is the beach really as close from there as the owner claims?
- Which stop is closest to the address you are going to and what is the best route to get there?
- Do you want to save places that are important to you in the app so you can easily return to them?
App Modes
Two app modes let you customise the app to your liking:
- Basic mode for beginners, without unnecessary functions that you are not going to use anyway.
- Advanced mode: a lot of settings and functions, without which it is difficult to imagine a meaningful navigation app for the blind.
Important Notes
There are a few things to keep in mind to make using Seeing Assistant Go convenient and safe for you:
- The app is not a replacement for a white cane or a guide dog. It is a supplement to these rehabilitation aids.
- The information in the app comes from map data, not from observation of the terrain. It may inform about closed places and ignore others that have not yet been mapped.
- The routes suggested by the application do not take into account local conditions, such as pavement repairs or other temporary obstacles and impediments on the road.
About the Team Behind the App
As with our other applications in the Seeing Assistant family, we have also included the best of what we have in the Transition Technologies team in Go:
- More than a decade of experience in creating innovative software for the blind.
- An uncompromising approach to maximising the product’s accessibility for screen readers.
- Openness to implementing users’ ideas: we cannot guarantee that we will implement all good ideas quickly, but we will certainly do it better than anyone else!
Free or paid:
- Free
Accessibility and User Comments:
The app is designed for use with screen readers, and TalkBack actions are widely used. Jieshuo Screen Reader does not support some interface elements, in particular, it does not read additional information on some buttons and the function of automatically announcing the first item in lists does not work. OpenStreetMap is used as the cartographic base.
Last Tested App version and Android version:
1.0.12, Android 13.
My daily use case is in a rural setting where geographic databases such as OSM have very low information density. As such I rely heavily on the ability to define custom routes (aka bread crumbing) with open field navigation. I was pleased to find out that Seeing Assistant Go supported this and provided access to it in the basic mode. It was very easy to create a custom route and follow it. Well done.