technologyreview.com
Blind people say autonomous cars could transform their lives
Elizabeth Woyke
Advocates for the visually impaired are talking to companies and
legislators about developing vehicles they will be able to drive
independently.
• by Elizabeth Woyke
• October 12, 2016
During a few days in August, the parking lot at Perkins School for the
Blind morphed into a test zone where a golf-cart-like vehicle
transported students and staff members, guided by a laptop. It was a
prototype from Optimus Ride, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that
is developing self-driving technologies for electric vehicles.
Though the trip was short and followed a programmed course, it generated
excitement at Perkins, the country’s oldest school for the blind, which
serves 200 blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind students on its
campus and hundreds more through programs in local schools. Advocates
for the blind—at Perkins and beyond—say driverless cars could
revolutionize their lives, provided the vehicles are designed to be
accessible. As the promise of a truly autonomous car draws closer,
organizations representing people who are blind are taking a more active
role in shaping the vehicles and software being developed.
“Autonomous vehicles will be transformative for people who are blind,”
says Dave Power, Perkins’s president and CEO. “For the first time, they
will be able to get to school, work, and community activities
independently, regardless of distance. There is tremendous enthusiasm
about it, both here and nationally, among the blind.”
National Federation of the Blind president Mark Riccobono preparing to
drive the car developed by the organization’s Blind Driver Challenge in
2011.
Advocates want companies to make their autonomous vehicles disability
friendly rather than produce special cars for the visually impaired,
which would probably be extremely expensive. Power, a former technology
executive, knows the blind community can’t assume that
autonomous-vehicle makers will take their needs into account. So he has
begun inviting technology companies to Perkins’s campus to make
presentations and gather feedback. “We want to help these vendors build
accessibility into their designs and think about people who are blind up
front,” says Power.
Optimus Ride was the first company to respond to Power’s invitation.
During its visits, the startup test-drove its vehicle on Perkins’s
38-acre property. It also held a brainstorming session to learn how
driverless cars can best serve blind people and whether they could be
deployed as shuttles on large campuses.
Perkins employees say they gave the startup numerous suggestions, such
as making sure to provide adequate floor space for service dogs. They
also emphasized the need for a nonvisual interface that passengers could
use to communicate with the car. For example, a touch-screen-controlled
vehicle could accommodate blind users by integrating voice technology or
haptic feedback.
The setup could mimic the gesture-based screen readers that people with
impaired vision use to navigate their smartphones and apps. In fact, the
Perkins group recommended that Optimus Ride create an app for its future
users. Jim Denham, Perkins’s educational technology coördinator, says he
anticipates using an app to do everything from summoning a car to
instructing it to make an unscheduled stop and wait while he unloads his
belongings. The app, in turn, could give users periodic status updates
about the vehicle’s progress and notify them when they’ve reached their
destination.
Beyond vehicle and software design, the blind community wants to
influence regulations governing driverless cars. The National Federation
of the Blind (NFB), the country’s largest organization for blind people,
has championed the idea of cars for the blind since the early 2000s,
when it organized a Blind Driver Challenge to encourage universities to
create nonvisual interfaces for cars. NFB spokesperson Chris Danielsen
says the group has since asked Google to incorporate accessibility
features into its self-driving car. The NFB also plans to attend an
upcoming conference hosted by Daimler, at the invitation of the German
auto giant, and to submit comments on the automated-vehicle rules that
the U.S. Department of Transportation released recently.
The American Council of the Blind (ACB), a national grassroots advocacy
group, has been tracking state laws to ensure that they don’t prohibit
blind people from using autonomous vehicles. When early adopter states,
such as Nevada, were considering legislation authorizing self-driving
cars, blind advocacy groups asked lawmakers to keep the wording less
specific, according to ACB president Kim Charlson. “We don’t think being
blind should be a reason why we can’t take advantage of these cars,” she
adds. “On the contrary, we think it’s a reason we should use them.”
Charlson, like other advocates for the blind community, is looking
forward to a future of fully autonomous vehicles in which a blind person
would not need to do any type of driving and authorities would be
alerted if the car got into trouble. Blind people say that riding in
semi-autonomous cars, alongside sighted passengers able to serve as
drivers, would not expand their current transportation options. After
all, they can already get lifts from friends or family members, take
taxis or Ubers, or use paratransit vans, which provide shared
door-to-door transportation to people with disabilities. “If we still
have to have another person in the vehicle, we’re no better off than
now, regardless of how sophisticated the technology is,” points out
NFB’s Danielsen.
“Autonomous vehicles are going to be the future,” adds Charlson. “My
objective is to make sure people who are blind get to equally be part of
that future.”
--
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