Chapter 50: The Visually Impaired Community

After spending the entire afternoon showing Lin Wei around the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, it was quite obvious that the girl was overjoyed. Compared to when they had first met, she spoke a lot more.

To express her gratitude, she even treated Zhou Yun to a meal at a restaurant near the campus. Zhou Yun naturally did not refuse, and before parting ways, the two added each other as contacts.

After dinner, Zhou Yun returned to his hotel. Without doing anything else, he opened his laptop and began searching for information.

Ten minutes later, he looked at the computer screen with a sigh. Previously, he had no idea that within the domestic population alone, the number of visually impaired individuals reached as high as 17 million.

This was a terrifyingly huge number, and the fully blind population—those like Lin Wei who could not see anything at all—accounted for a full eight million.

Although the government and some enterprises were trying their best to provide convenience for these visually impaired individuals, due to various limitations, they were still a long way from truly solving the travel difficulties faced by the visually impaired.

In his view, perhaps the best current solution for the travel of the blind community was guide dogs.

This was because a well-trained guide dog, except for its inability to speak, was no different from a real human being.

However, according to data, nationwide there were only 400 guide dogs to date. A ratio of one in twenty thousand meant that out of eight million completely blind people, only four hundred could possess a guide dog—far rarer than one in ten thousand.

This vividly showed that training every single guide dog was extremely difficult, meaning it was doomed never to become a routine solution. In the field of computer science, that would be called a lack of generalizability.

Of course, there were now technologies capable of creating robotic guide dogs, and the results were quite good. But there was one catch—they were expensive!

The better the results, the higher the price!

Such exorbitant costs predetermined that this was something only a privileged few could afford, unless these merchants suddenly grew a conscience and offered massive discounts, though Zhou Yun felt that was impossible.

Aside from electronic guide dogs, there were also smart glasses, brain-computer interfaces, and other means.

Yet, all these methods shared a common trait—they were expensive!

They were simply beyond the financial reach of ordinary people.

Therefore, Zhou Yun began to wonder if there were any low-cost technological solutions.

To achieve low cost, the first requirement was not to generate too many extra expenses. Wearable devices like smart glasses had to be ruled out; the solution had to start with items they already used daily.

For the blind, especially those who needed to travel, what items were essential?

A white cane and a smartphone. The white cane went without saying—90 percent of the credit for a blind person's ability to travel belonged to it. As for the smartphone, for a modern person, one could lack anything when going out except for a phone.

The train of thought in his mind gradually became clearer.

Sensors could be installed on the white cane to collect various kinds of information, while the smartphone could serve as a data processing terminal.

Through voice prompts provided by the phone, combined with the white cane itself, it should greatly facilitate the travel of the blind—at least ensuring they wouldn't easily get injured just by encountering a flight of stairs.

The sensors on the white cane itself could be fully realized with current technological means. Things like ultrasonic ranging and vibration sensors could basically all be mounted on the white cane, and perhaps even a couple of cameras could be integrated into it.

The real difficulty still lay on the smartphone side. First, it was necessary to guarantee the accuracy of the prompts; second, the speed of the prompts had to be extremely fast.

Otherwise, if there were a pit ahead and the prompts only came after someone had already stepped into it, that would simply be harming them.

When processing such multi-modal data, achieving rapid response solely relying on a smartphone would be exceedingly difficult.

However, if servers were built for this purpose, the ultimate cost would fall back onto the consumers, making it expensive. Moreover, even with servers built, it might not necessarily achieve the rapid response he desired.

Because blind people could not possibly all happen to stay around servers, and uncertain factors like network conditions would cause response latency. If any bad consequences resulted from network latency, that was not what Zhou Yun wanted to see.

Therefore, the ultimate solution still had to be deployed directly on the smartphone. Beyond this, partnerships could be formed with certain navigation apps. To his knowledge, some navigation apps had already developed specialized features for the visually impaired.

Some smartphone manufacturers were also adding more accessibility features to their phones, but there were certain drawbacks as well. For instance, there was one issue that left Zhou Yun utterly baffled.

Why did the accessibility features of certain smartphones require tapping the screen step-by-step just to be activated? Was that reasonable?

Couldn't they just add a voice prompt during the phone's initial setup to activate the accessibility features directly via voice commands? Was that really such a difficult thing to do?

It was simply a matter of never having thought about it.

Still, it could be seen that attention from all sectors of society toward the visually impaired was increasing. Of course, it might also just be these companies trying to win a good reputation, but regardless, at least they were taking action.

With the basic train of thought established, what he needed to consider next was what form this function should take.

An app? A mini-program?

Zhou Yun felt that neither would work because if he wanted to accelerate response speed as much as possible, it would inevitably require directly controlling the underlying hardware of the phone.

Current apps and mini-programs suffered from excessive encapsulation, which would inevitably introduce unnecessary latency. If possible, it was best to embed it directly into the smartphone's operating system.

And the most important point was how to optimize human-computer interaction. In fact, based on his afternoon chat with Lin Wei, he could see that,

Even though many AIs still looked like artificial idiots in people's eyes nowadays, they were already capable of relatively smooth human-computer interaction.

A smartphone AI assistant?

If the smartphone AI assistant could be given some specialized accessibility optimization—for instance, blind people actually didn't need many visual interfaces because they couldn't see them anyway—stripping away non-essential visual interfaces could save a massive amount of hardware resources for the phone.

This shared a wonderful similarity with the Linux system on computers. However, because most people in this world were still sighted, to ensure normal communication with sighted people, the necessary software still had to be retained.

The more Zhou Yun thought about it, the more ideas came to him. He wanted to use technology as much as possible to help these blind people live normal lives, but the more he thought, the more he felt the road ahead was fraught with difficulties.

Moreover, even though he wanted to stand in the perspective of the blind to consider these issues as much as possible, he was not blind after all, and many subtle details might escape his notice.

Tomorrow, he still had a partnership meeting with the representatives from Xiaomi. Perhaps he could ask them about it; while checking information earlier, he found that among the market players doing well in smartphone accessibility, Xiaomi was certainly one of them. Who knows, something might actually come out of that discussion.

He glanced at the time and saw that it was already past ten o'clock. Looking at the organized thoughts on the screen, Zhou Yun did not feel tired at all; instead, he felt an immense sense of fulfillment, sensing that he might genuinely be able to use the technology in his mind to help people who truly needed it.