I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc… neat!
EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we’re discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.
Let me guess, absolutely proprietary?
spits
There is something so fucking sinister about public infrastructure relying on closed source accessibility tools.
You make a simple app and the company pays you small fee every time a scan results in a purchase. You also sell users’ data because you obviously track all of that. Now companies selling accessibility products can target the customer with ads. Success!
It’s easier than applying for grants, and no one seems to mind this kind of economy. It’s just a win/win. That is, it actually helps the visually impaired, and no one seems to care about being tracked or installing an app. “So what’s the problem?” /s?
It could have just been a QR code that links to a web page, but then who’s going to pay for it? Back to begging for grant money. I work with a non-profit. Applying for grants is a full time job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The vast, vast majority of open source projects are doing just fine without any grants.
And they’re known by everyone and widely used as the standard, riiiiiiight?
You probably don’t know about most the ones that aren’t doing fine, cus, you know, they aren’t doing so well.
Hmmmm. I certainly can’t think of any…
- Linux (including its distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora)
- Apache HTTP Server
- Mozilla Firefox
- LibreOffice
- VLC
- GIMP
- Blender
- WordPress
- MySQL
- Python
- Git
- Docker
- TensorFlow
- Kubernetes
While these names may not be on the forefront of the public’s mind, they’re still insanely ubiquitous. There’s no reason this needed to be a proprietary tracking service. Especially not one that takes advantage of those with disabilities.
Oh, I thought this was a joke.
Yeah but no. I think, in a way, they’re having your phone’s camera assist you if you can’t see well.
Yeah, it looks like it’s both more detailed navigation for sighted people, and geared towards helping people with difficulty seeing.
Wish it didn’t look like to be a proprietary code format, since that severely limits it’s viability as a widespread thing.
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I’m disappointed the London underground is using this proprietary thing, rather than QR codes, which have existed forever and are an open standard.
oh is that what these are? I saw something like this on a train station in Boston the other day, assumed it was some new kind of QR code or something
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QR codes are rarely contentful themselves, they are almost always just a URL pointing to the real content.
It’s done this way because URLs are smaller, and you can update the content without needing to go around replacing all the QR code stickers.
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If cloud.navilens.com ever goes down, every single code they generated will be broken forever.
And this is virtually guaranteed to happen before too long, leaving tons of useless technicolor QR codes as monuments to the endeavor.
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It seems to me like they do more than just generate QR codes that download a static document. They’ve built out software that helps the visually impaired navigate pedestrian and transit infrastructure. The software seems pretty complex, beyond what a city would likely have the expertise or budget to build from scratch on its own.
You point out the key weakness to the whole approach (dependency on a single third party). Though I suspect that the content in question is also hosted by NaviLens, so the codes would still stop working if they ever shut down.
Just taking a look at their website, it seems to me that NaviLens’ value proposition isn’t just “codes that download a document”, but an entire framework for building and presenting essential documentation in a way that is accessible to people with vision impairments. I can see why it would be cheaper and more effective for a city to buy a service like this than to hire their own software developers and accessibility experts to build out their own bespoke system.
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QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.
These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.
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Thats cool & looks useful for alot of people. Type of app my grandma would use for fine print on products.
I hope the doomers didnt get you down too much. Open source is great, but options like this are still better than nothing :)
I looked them up after seeing them on trams in Melbourne.
also, they place the WAI/WCAG banner but the webpage does not validate :PPP nice project tho, fuck the nerds
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