Dancing With Technology and The Right Number Of Crashes Is Not Zero
My recent enjoyable and amusing San Francisco experience of two blind men locating and riding in an entirely autonomous Waymo. The future of independent blind travel is getting closer, but there is still a real challenge in joining up the dots for an end to end inclusive experience
As mentioned in last week's post, The Blind Man's Waltz, for all my life I have witnessed a two steps forward, one step back dance between technology and inclusivity for people with sight loss.
Mainstream use cases sometimes do drive development of life changing tech for blind people, such as the superb quality conversational voice interfaces to computers we are now experiencing.
On the other hand, I honestly thought no-one could turn a telephone into a shiny brick for blind people as effectively as Apple did in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. Just try using your smartphone in its normal mode with your eyes shut. I'd be amazed if you can even call your partner or tell the time, let alone swiping right, ordering an Uber or getting a take out.
Last month, in the technology centre of at least this solar system known colloquially as The Valley I had the opportunity to ride in an entirely autonomous Waymo taxi. Waymo’s San Francisco service launch last year is a particularly remarkable technological feat as these streets are often narrow, steep and crisscrossed with cable cars, cross streets and European tourists (much more prone to jay walking than the local residents).
However, despite the allure of autonomous vehicles as the future of blind independent travel, there are some significant challenges in ‘Last Yard Accessibility’. The rough analogy here is to last mile parcel delivery, where a novel approach is required for the final hop, economically and swiftly getting chocolate bars, beers and replacement headphones into the hands of over paid and impatient consumers; think electric cargo bikes, or even drones.
For last yard blind accessibility the key challenges are rather different. Firstly, how do I find my autonomous vehicle when it arrives? Secondly, when said vehicle smugly announces that I have arrived at my destination, how do I actually find the destination - the door to the bar, the steps into the subway or the tantalisingly fragrant street food which is just out of reach. I look forward to the day when a low flying drone guide can navigate me the last yard, but hopefully we can develop some more prosaic AI powered solutions in the coming months.
I had also been told by colleagues that the Waymo experience would be problematic for me as there is a touch screen in the car with a ‘visual only’ start button.
So I was triply sceptical when my blind friend Amos thrust his iPhone at me demanding I take us on a Waymo ride to my hotel.
In 2009, a magical forward step, integrating the excellent Voiceover feature, transformed the iPhone shiny brick into my most treasured accessibility companion for the last 15 years. For example, with Voiceover enabled, the Uber app is accessible enough to eliminate many blind ride hailing frustrations. My first pleasant surprise in SF was that the Waymo app is remarkably similar to the Uber one and also has a wonderful ‘Honk The Horn’ button. Once the car had arrived, Amos and I shot off down the sidewalk repeatedly pressing Honk The Horn in a blind man's race to see which of us could find Mr Waymo first. Several anxious passers by asked if we needed help, only to be excitedly shooed away with cryptic explanations that we were undertaking an inclusivity experiment.
My second pleasant surprise was that everything available on the car display can also be activated from the app using Voiceover. So, once buckled up, I simply pressed ‘Start’ in the app and off we went.
My third scepticism was unfortunately not overcome when the Waymo snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, dropping us over 100m from my hotel. Apparently this is not in any way disabled discrimination – the drop off algorithm is well known by all regular users to be sub-optimal.
So all in all not a bad experience. Work to be done but I am much less sceptical than I was a month ago.
One other Waymo observation. It turns out that local drivers in SF have realized that Waymos are really polite and safe. Consequently drivers are prone to the sort of behaviour cutting up Waymos that would normally incite road rage on a criminal scale. Waymo’s track record for accidents per mile is almost 1,000 times, i.e. 3 orders of magnitude, less than the national human driver average. But I do wonder how many of the extremely few Waymo prangs were actually caused by discourteous other road users.
I’m pretty sure that a few more non-fatal, but inconvenient and expensive crashes imposed on the drivers of San Francisco would ultimately make everyone else more respectful and reduce Waymo’s crash stats even further. Of course this would be an utterly impractical policy change, but zero crashes is not the right number.