On May 25, 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 alleged accuracy of up to 3 feet (0.9 meters)**
At the same time, the software is not applicable to GPS. It 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.
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.
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 deploy the application in the whole subway system by early 2023**
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".
