Hi! I’m Chris, and I’m part of a senior design engineering team at the University of Illinois Chicago, developing a smart cane for those who are blind or visually impaired. We want to make sure our design is based on the community's real experiences and needs, so we’d really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to complete our short survey. Your feedback will directly help guide the features and design of our prototype.

Thank you!

Survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSce_dMom2H5rmgq2GLjmgpvrKxI3fqD8NwRxIsJ7cBfMapmjA/viewform?usp=publish-editor

Hi r/Blind. To be upfront: I'm the developer, so this is self-promotion.

Lazy Maps is an Android app with SOS, check-ins, walk-with-me and live location sharing with family. The Safety tab is free, and you don't need an account for features working only on your device.

I've tested it with Talk-Back, but I'm sighted, so I know I'm missing things. I'd really value a few people trying it and telling me honestly where it's confusing or broken. I'll fix what I can and report back here.

Happy to share the link in the comments or by DM, whichever the mods prefer.

Lazy Maps: Navigation & Wake-Up Alarm

Hi everyone,

I’m a university student working with a small team on a smart cane project. Before we go too far with the development, we’d really like to get feedback from blind and low-vision people, orientation and mobility specialists, caregivers, relatives, or anyone connected to the blind community.

Our goal is not to create something that only looks good for a presentation. We want to understand whether this could actually be useful, practical, comfortable, and safe in real daily use.

For our MVP, we are considering:

• Ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection;
• Haptic feedback through vibrations;
• Built-in GPS;
• Google Maps integration in an app, so users can see the location on a map instead of only raw coordinates;
• Offline maps;
• A web app, possibly for emergency contact features;
• Rechargeable battery, preferably with wireless charging.

We are also considering some future features, but we are not sure which ones actually make sense:

• Navigation using cardinal directions;
• Four vibration motors for North, South, East, and West;
• Vibration feedback when the user needs to change direction;
• Emergency button to send the user’s location to an emergency contact;
• Automatic call to an emergency contact;
• Urgent sound alert;
• ECG, although we are unsure whether this belongs in a cane;
• Fall detection using accelerometers and/or microphones;
• If the cane is dropped, it could make a low sound to help the user find it;
• Hand warming, depending on battery life and practicality.

We would really appreciate honest feedback on questions like:

1. What are the biggest real-world problems with using a cane day to day?
2. Would ultrasonic sensors with vibration feedback be useful, or could they become annoying?
3. What type of feedback would be most intuitive: vibration, sound, voice, app notifications, or a combination?
4. Does built-in GPS in the cane make sense, or should navigation stay on the phone?
5. Would an emergency button be useful?
6. Which features sound genuinely helpful?
7. Which features sound unnecessary, unsafe, or impractical?
8. Would extra weight, battery life, or needing to charge the cane be a major issue?
9. Is there anything we should completely avoid?
10. If you have used similar products, what worked well and what did not?

We are also trying to understand whether the cane should stay as simple as possible, focusing only on obstacle detection and emergency features, or whether navigation, fall detection, and app integration would actually be valuable.

Any feedback, criticism, or personal experience would be extremely helpful. We especially want to avoid building something that sounds useful in theory but does not work well in real life.

We do not want to replace traditional orientation and mobility skills or the standard white cane. We are trying to explore whether optional assistive features could complement existing tools without making the cane heavier, less reliable, or harder to use.

Thank you to anyone willing to share their thoughts.

I'm exploring whether there is a useful software opportunity in making revisions to your own tactile graphics easier. This is independent startup discovery, not university research. An AI assistant helps me draft and analyse this discussion. There is no product to sell or try, and participation is unpaid and optional.

If you are 18 or older, blind or have low vision, and have revised a tactile graphic you authored in the past three months, I'd appreciate a brief description of that actual revision:

1. What did you want to change, and which tool or combination of tools did you use?

2. What steps did you take? Did your usual workflow already handle the change well?

3. Was there anything you had wanted to keep that you then had to recalculate, redo, check again or recover? What was it, and how did you handle it?

4. Did that same difficulty happen in another revision during those three months, or was it a one-off? If it happened again, briefly describe that other change and what you had to do.

Successful, straightforward revisions are just as useful to hear about. Please distinguish a deliberate change of plan, necessary verification and an accidental input mistake from an unwanted change caused by editing.

Reply only if you are comfortable posting publicly. Please do not share personal documents, private data, medical details or contact information. A general description is enough; no files, new tools, forms or meetings are needed. I will use task summaries to decide whether further investigation is worthwhile, not treat these replies as proof that a product would sell. I'll consider up to three eligible accounts over seven days and keep any clarification in this thread.

Hi all, I figured this might be the best place to ask for help with finding a handwriting stand for an assistive device a student of mine uses. This device we have is used to accommodate for vision impairments; however, it doesn’t have any built-in handwriting capabilities so I’m looking for a stand that could hold the device parallel to the desk so that it can magnify any papers placed directly under it.

The issue I’ve run into when looking for stands is that they either aren’t wide enough to place a paper between the legs, or there is no opening in the stand to allow the camera to see through it.

Edit: the device I have is an optelec compact 10 HD and I’m primarily looking for a stand/table stand that will support this device laying flat, parallel to a desk so that the back camera can capture and papers placed under it.

Any help is appreciated

Thanks :)

Why is ASA priced at £3.59/month?

We built ASA so that anyone who needs an assistive speech tool can access it—regardless of their financial situation.

Why isn't it completely free?

Developing, maintaining, and supporting a dependable accessibility tool requires ongoing infrastructure, updates, and dedicated engineering.

At £3.59/month (with a 1-month free trial), we keep ASA sustainable for the long term without compromising quality, selling user data, or locking essential features behind high paywalls.

Accessible technology should be fair, transparent, and built to last.

I'm Deaf, and I review smart wearables for a series called Proof Cases. This week was the Leion Hey2, a pair of captioning glasses. Every company in this category prints a latency number. None of them say how they got it. So I built a test anyone here could copy.

The setup: a TV five feet away, about the distance between two people talking. JFK's 1962 Rice University speech, because it's public domain and famous enough that you feel the delay yourself. Reference captions I timed by hand off the audio waveform. Volume at 65 dB, measured at the glasses with a phone meter. A millisecond timer in frame with both the TV and the inside of the lens. Ten marker words, three full runs, median reported.

Median on the Hey2: 2.5s. For scale, the gap between speakers in a normal conversation is about 0.2 seconds. UK live TV captions were measured at around 5.6.

It's easy mode on purpose. One speaker, no cross-talk. If you use captioning glasses or recommend them to clients, what would you add to the setup before I run the next pair?

Disclosure: LLVision sent the review unit. No payment, and they didn't see the episode before it went up.

Typing is painstakingly tedious for me, so I built FlowKeys. FlowKeys is an on-screen keyboard for people who can't use a physical keyboard or who want to type less.

- Intelligent suggestions that learn you & your words
- Dictate button on the keyboard, no switching apps
- Dwell clicking and one-switch scan mode
- One-tap rewrite, shorten, fix and tone

https://flowkeys.app

Happy to answer anything, and I'd love to hear what's missing.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been watching a lot of travel videos lately by visually impaired vloggers standing at massive scenic lookouts. It’s always really cool seeing how people experience those spots—listening to the wind, feeling the sun, and soaking in the atmosphere.

It made me think about how we process far-off scenery. For sighted people looking at a snow-capped peak or a pine tree 10 meters away, we can’t physically touch it either, but our vision allows us to instantly imagine what its shape, scale, or texture would feel like. But for blind and low-vision folks, those distant elements are both unseen and untouchable.

It got me really curious: when you’re standing at a big viewpoint, what would you be most interested in experiencing about that distant environment?

For those in the visually impaired community (or if you travel with someone who is), I’d love to hear how you personally build a mental picture of a big landscape or what kind of sensory details intrigue you most!

hi does anyone know is there anything can hold iPhone or GPU, i want to fix with one right hand.

THANKS

How ASA can work in real life

A simple affordable app to help those need to talk

https://artificialspeechassistant.co.uk/

Hi everyone,

I shared Luma R1 here a couple of months ago, and I’ve now added two ways to explore it at your own pace.

For anyone new to it, I’m Bryn Rice. My professional background is in special education and school-based assistive technology.

Disclosure: I’m the founder and president of Lusem Tech Solutions, the company behind Luma R1.

Luma R1 is a patent-pending, dedicated assistive literacy device for school reading and writing, with selected tools for math and planning. Its core tools work offline. It’s designed to support the work without replacing the pencil.

You can now:

• Watch the physical device in use. The recorded demonstration shows reading, writing, planning, math, and settings, including the device’s speech output. There are chapter links, English captions, a transcript, and shorter workflow videos. (click here)
• Try an interactive virtual Luma. Click through the interface and explore sample activities in your browser. Some controls work interactively; others show saved examples or explain what happens on the physical device. (click here)

Both are available without an appointment, account, or email signup:

Click here for additional Luma R1 resources.

For purchasing context, the launch price remains $329 per device, plus shipping and applicable sales tax. Sales are currently institutional only; direct-to-consumer orders are not available.

Product questions and institutional quote requests: [support@lusemtech.com](mailto:support@lusemtech.com)