FastCoExist
Push the walk signal at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 23rd Street in Manhattan, and a robotic voice will tell you to wait and then emit a series of rapid-fire clicks when the light turns green. For someone who’s blind, it’s a crucial tool for navigating. But out of New York City’s more than 12,000 intersections, fewer than 100 have audible signals. The same thing is true in most cities: Only about 10% of corners have new technology.
A new app called SeeLight makes ordinary walk signals accessible for everyone. If you’re blind, the app can tell you how many seconds you have left to cross, and point you in the right direction if you start to veer out of the crosswalk.
Cities can add data from each traffic light directly into the app, so it automatically knows when a particular light is green or red. But if government is slow to act, everyone else who lives in a city can help the app crowdsource details as they wait to cross the street.
“Public bodies can be notoriously slow at being proactive and temporary traffic lights are forever popping up when roads are being worked on,” says Vlad Sitnikov, creative director of Hungry Boys, the Moscow-based team that that developed the app. “SeeLight helps manage this uncertainty.”
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