On May 25, Beijing time, on Tuesday (May 24), local time, an application designed to help visually impaired or blind pedestrians use public transport made its debut at the Washington subway station** The app, called waymap, is designed to expand travel options for blind and visually impaired people, providing audio instructions for each step, with an accuracy of up to 3 feet (0.9 meters).
It is understood that the application does not use GPS and can operate normally regardless of the signal strength of indoor or outdoor mobile phones. It will load detailed map data into smart phones and use the motion sensors on mobile phones to provide accurate direction guidance.
On Tuesday (May 24), the association of blind advocates, Metro, Verizon communications (VZ. N), a public transportation system in Washington, and Tom pey, the founder and CEO of the application, officially announced the launch and application of waymap at a news conference in Washington.
Tom pey, the founder of waymap, said he was blind and found that he was not accurate enough after using other applications. He believed that "mobile is not a luxury. In fact, it is a human right."
Pei said that blind travelers usually can only use individual familiar routes starting from home as travel routes because they can only rely on memory and lack confidence and security.
Blind people can only walk by memory and lack confidence and security
Waymap plans to deploy in phases. The goal is to deploy the application in up to 30 subway railway stations and nearly 1000 bus stations by September and the entire subway system by early 2023.
Waymap plans to deploy in phases
PAYE hopes that other people without visual impairment will eventually use the app to help them improve direction guidance and update maps. PAYE calls "you're actually donating your steps to a blind person".