[Accessibility] Introduction and sneak peek

[Nolan Darilek]

Hello. I wanted to drop a quick note to introduce myself, and to mention 
a project I'd appreciate feedback on before I blog/tweet about it.

I'm blind, and have used accessible GPS for the past four years or so. 
While I like the concept, everything out there is too expensive, fairly 
niche or just isn't that good. I thought that I could do better and, 
while it's been a long road with many rewrites, I think that I finally 
have a good start.

I've called the project Hermes because he's the deity of lots of cool 
travel-related concepts, and I wanted a name that would capture the 
notion that accessible GPS is as much about fun and adventure as it is 
about mundane things. The architecture makes lots of the map import and 
description code available as a GUI-agnostic core, atop which any number 
of apps can be developed.

To that end I've been focusing on Hermes Mobile, the web-based 
front-end. It uses the geolocation support available in most modern 
browsers and a bunch of accessible AJAX to present what I think is a 
nice map-browsing experience. My intent is to design something that can 
run on phones and other internet-connected devices. I haven't actually 
tested it in the field yet, but I've performed searches and browsed lots 
of locations from my desktop, so in theory it should work live, though I 
haven't optimized it for this use case yet.

I've put up a demo instance for folks to play with. You can find it at 
http://thewordnerd.homeip.net, with a few caveats:

* I live in Texas, and only have the TX map loaded. You can still 
experiment with it from outside of TX, just enter a TX address or city 
into the search field (I.e. "Austin, TX".) Austin seems to have more 
thorough POI coverage than other TX cities I've tried.
* It's running on my desktop, so if it gets too much use then I may have 
to pull it.
* It may occasionally be down. I bounce it daily to relaunch the newest 
version with whatever changes I've implemented that day. If this happens 
then your session will be cleared and you'll have to start browsing 
again once it's back up.

Just visit the above website and optionally authorize your browser to 
share your location if given the choice. Type addresses, cities or lat, 
lon pairs into the search box to select a starting location. To initiate 
the search, tab away from the box and the area which formerly displayed 
nearby nodes switches to search results. If you decide not to visit any 
of these, simply clear the search field, tab away again and the nearby 
nodes reappear. When you're on the map, the area on the left displays 
nearby nodes with distance and bearing where possible, and if you're on 
a street, buttons near the bottom move you to adjacent intersections. 
You can either browse linearly along the road network, or non-linearly 
by selecting points. To select a node from the list on the left, either 
arrow to it or select it with the mouse then tab or mouse away. If you 
do a search and aren't located on a road initially, you'll have to 
select a node on the left to move anywhere.

Distances are metric by default, but if you prefer imperial units then 
click the "KPH" popup where speed is displayed and change it to MPH. 
This globally changes the measurement system for the duration of your 
session.

I have lots of plans for this. More immediately I want to add augmented 
reality features so you can do things like attach notes to locations and 
have those displayed when you get within a configurable range--great for 
remembering which door is the one to your favorite restaurant or store, 
or for documenting button layouts on laundry or vending machines. I'm 
also pondering social network integration. Maybe you need to find a bus 
stop but can't find a pedestrian to ask. In these instances, simply snap 
a picture of where you are and post a link to that plus Google and OSM 
views of the area to Twitter and Facebook. Your friends and followers 
simply visit a page in the app, answer your posted question and their 
responses appear in your mobile browser.

Both the core and the web app code are GPL, though I haven't yet set up 
the hosting infrastructure to make the code available. If there's 
developer interest, though, then I may be inspired to do so sooner 
rather than later. :) Everything's written in Scala using LibOSM for the 
mapping and Lift as the web framework.

Anyhow, I'm very interested in feedback. I'm also curious as to how well 
the site works on accessible iPhones/iPod Touches. I tested it briefly 
on Safari under OS X 10.5 but it failed spectacularly, and I'm guessing 
this means that the iPhone is out, and other research I've done suggests 
that Mobile Safari doesn't support geolocation APIs, meaning selecting a 
start location is purely search-driven right now. Hopefully Apple will 
get with the program re: ARIA and other accessibility standards, because 
it works quite well under Firefox and Orca. I don't know how it looks 
visually, but I've tried to design a layout that makes sense and looks 
tolerable. :)

Have a great day.