Lazarillo or Seeing eye gps

Justin, it sounds like you found your solution, although it is not free. The Seeing Eye app has been around for many years. Lazarillo has been available only recently. The developer welcomes feedback and would like a report with detailed specifics. I have paid for Blind Square and recently used Lazarillo on a neighborhood trip here in Chicago to compare it with Blind Square. It was to a specific destination and I used Lazarillo with both Apple Maps and Google Maps, as I visited the same destination multiple times on different days. Blind Square did speak more than Lazarillo. I found the many announcements supportive and helpful. Others find them to be too chatty and an annoyance. When Blind Square speaks an announcement, it speaks the street address and the nearest intersection in the user’s path of travel. I would say Lazarillo is good at this point but not great like the Seeing eye app or Blind Square. The only way iPhone apps for the blind go from good to great is through significant and highly specific user feedback so contact the Lazarillo developer either through his website or through the app. Award winning apps like Seeing eye, Overcast, Blind Square, Weather Gods, and Lire get to this level is through communicative blind end users and developers willing to work with the blind community, roll up their sleeves, and create insanely useful and accessible apps. If you want to hear what Blind Square sounds like as an app, visit YouTube and search for blind Square. Some blind users have posted demonstrations of the app.

Also, the only way travel skills get better is through practice. Training only does so much. With constant feedback, the apps really help and boost my confidence in unfamiliar places. Keep on trucking.

Seeing Eye GPS is now called GoodMaps Outdoors and best of all, it's free.

Goodmaps acquired Seeing Eye GPS sometime ago and now it is Goodmaps Outdoor, and it is free. I think they still have Seeing Eye GPS available for the people who paid for it, but they haven't updated it for a long time.

For more information visit the following link:

https://www.goodmaps.com/news/good-maps-acquires-the-sendero-gps-mobile-apps-from-aira-which-are-now-free

Another thing to try is Google Maps. It is free and there walking directions are quite good. To get the most accurate reading with this app, you want to be moving while you are using it. Otherwise, I really like Google Maps. Good to have a couple of free tools in your GPS toolbox to use in different situations.

The digital maps come from large data providers. Originally, these companies obtained historic analog maps for local roads and streets and incorporated this data into the digital products developed in the last several decades. It is likely one of these companies obtained a local analog map of all the roads and streets in your town and county that was decades old. Over time, the public road has been renamed, taken over by private property owners, abandoned, turned into a driveway, or covered over and incorporated into a bigger property. I experienced this when I was in Colorado Springs, the amateur sports capitol of America, several years ago for a powerlifting competition. I stayed at a hotel that opened in the late 1960s. the hotel offered coupons for a free breakfast at a restaurant in a strip mall nearby. As a powerlifter, I need to constantly eat so I took advantage of the offer and used a blind navigation app, I forget which one, to give me turn by turn directions to get there. The hotel had many driveways and access roads so getting to the restaurant was not simple. I followed the directions and eventually found the place and had breakfast. Coming back to the hotel, I thought I was on the right path and a passerby asked if I needed help. I said I was trying to follow a particular street to get to the hotel. The person was older and a longtime Colorado Springs resident. He explained that both the strip mall and the hotel were part of a massive real estate development in the 1960s where public streets, homes and some small businesses were all demolished to build new buildings. Some local streets were incorporated into the development as access roads and fragments of others were driveways. The blind navigation app was giving me the name of a local road the developer took over in the 1960s and the app may not have added all the roads and driveways of the development so the app was correct but misfiring. I eventually figured out a path of travel to the shopping mall, which also had a Mexican restaurant, when I left to go back home.

Even in big cities and highly influential countries, the digital map providers continue to make errors and be incomplete. Apple Maps until recently did not have the correct address and location for the Jazz Showcase, one of Chicago’s two premier jazz clubs. It has been at its current location since 2008. I sent in an error report to Apple, and a fully revised listing was added in about a week, which included a Yelp review. I attended a concert at the Jazz Showcase with an 18-year old friend from Germany. I learned about a secondary subway entrance on the way there that was just one block from the club. On the way home from the concert, my friend pulled out his cell phone, fired up Google Maps, and spoke about lengthy walking directions to another subway entrance. I said follow me and I led him to the nearby entrance, being stunned to find stairs on the sidewalk that descended underground. I mentioned that not everything was on Google Maps and he then shouted the word Yet, believing strongly that digital mapping services will contain the world’s navigational knowledge in his lifetime. Apple Maps still struggles with data issues. The service does not have cycling directions in the Netherlands, the bicycling capitol of the world. Google has hired an army of contractors to add uniquely localized information to google Maps. This includes all the tricks cycling enthusiasts use in San Francisco to traverse its legendary steep hills.

Blind Square uses data from a service called Open Street Maps. It is based on historic map data and welcomes end users to edit the map. The editing feature is not accessible to the blind. Sighted people can rename streets, add streets, or remove them if the local conditions have changed since the analog map was originally digitized. This is not to say though that you could lead a community effort in your town to edit and revise the data in Open Street Maps with a sighted tech savvy local. Google and Apple can also be notified about any errors. Sure, your place does not have one of the top jazz clubs in the world, but small towns matter. They offer an affordable place to live when most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Small towns offer a respite from big city problems like high crime rates and untreated mental illness in a country that increasingly is working remotely, making the rural lifestyle economically viable for the first time for many.

Hi all! I work with the team at Lazarillo. Just wanted to thank you for trying out our app and let you know that our team is always making improvements and looking for your feedback to create the best product possible. We work daily with blind and visually impaired users, including many members of our staff, to create the most accessible experience possible, but we know that there is always a lot of room to grow and improve our app. If you ever have any questions for our team, you are welcome to reach out via email at hello@lazarillo.app. You can also visit our website at lazarillo.app/theapp to learn more about the Lazarillo App and what it can do, or visit our support page at lazarillo.app/usersupport to view a handful of useful tutorial videos on how to use all the different features of the app. Thanks again and best wishes from the Lazarillo team!