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Monday, 23 September 2013

Disruptions: Visually Impaired Turn to Smartphones to See Their World

Luis Perez loves taking photographs. He shoots mostly on an iPhone, snapping gorgeous pictures of sunsets, vintage cars, old buildings and cute puppies. But when he arrives at a photo shoot, people are often startled when he pulls out a long white cane.

In addition to being a professional photographer, Mr. Perez is almost blind.

“With the iPhone I am able to use the same technology as everyone else, and having a product that doesn’t have a stigma that other technologies do has been really important to me,” said Mr. Perez, who is also an advocate for blind people and speaks regularly at conferences about the benefits of technology for people who cannot see. “Now, even if you’re blind, you can still take a photo.”

Smartphones and tablets, with their flat glass touch screens and nary a texture anywhere, may not seem like the best technological innovation for people who cannot see. But advocates for the blind say the devices could be the biggest assistive aid to come along since Braille was invented in the 1820s.

Counterintuitive? You bet. People with vision problems can use a smartphone’s voice commands to read or write. They can determine denominations of money using a camera app, figure out where they are using GPS and compass applications, and, like Mr. Perez, take photos.

Google’s latest releases of its Android operating systems have increased its assistive technologies, specifically with updates to TalkBack, a Google-made application that adds spoken, audible and vibration feedback to a smartphone. Windows phones also offer some voice commands, but they are fewer than either Google’s or Apple’s.

Among Apple’s features are ones that help people with vision problems take pictures. In assistive mode, for example, the phone can say how many heads are in a picture and where they are in the frame, so someone who is blind knows if the family photo she is about to take includes everyone.

All this has come as a delightful shock to most people with vision problems.

“We were sort of conditioned to believe that you can’t use a touch screen because you can’t see it,” said Dorrie Rush, the marketing director of accessible technology at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit vision education and rehabilitation center. “The belief was the tools for the visually impaired must have a tactile screen, which, it turns out, is completely untrue.”

Ms. Rush, who has a retinal disorder, said that before the smartphone, people who were visually impaired could use a flip-phone to make calls, but they could not read on the tiny two-inch screens. While the first version of the iPhone allowed people who were losing their vision to enlarge text, it wasn’t until 2009, when the company introduced accessibility features, that the device became a benefit to blind people.

While some companies might have altruistic goals in building products and services for people who have lost their sight, the number of people who need these products is growing.

About 10 million people in the United States are blind or partly blind, according to statistics from the American Foundation for the Blind. And some estimates predict that over the next 30 years, as the vast baby boomer generation ages, the number of adults with vision impairments could double.

Apple’s assistive technologies also include VoiceOver, which the company says is the world’s first “gesture-based screen reader” and lets blind people interact with their devices using multitouch gestures on the screen. For example, if you slide a finger around the phone’s surface, the iPhone will read aloud the name of each application.

In a reading app, like one for a newspaper, swiping two fingers down the screen will prompt the phone to read the text aloud. Taking two fingers and holding them an inch apart, then turning them in a circle like opening a padlock calls a slew of menus, including ones with the ability to change VoiceOver’s rate of speech or language.

The iPhone also supports over 40 different Braille Bluetooth keyboards.

On all the mobile platforms, people with vision loss say, the real magic lies in the hundreds of apps that are designed specifically to help people who are blind.

There are apps that can help people see colors, so pointing their phones at an object will yield a detailed audio description of the color, like “pale yellow green” or “fresh apricot.” People who are blind say these apps open up an entirely new way of seeing the world. Light detection apps can emit a sound that intensifies when someone approaches a light source. This can be used to help people find a room’s exit, locate a window or turn off a light. There are apps that read aloud e-mails, the weather, stock prices as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds.

In the United States, one of the biggest challenges for blind people is figuring out a bill’s denomination. While coins are different sizes, there is no such differentiation between a $1 bill and a $100 bill. In the past, people with impairments had someone who could see help them fold notes differently to know which was which, or they carried an expensive third-party device, but now apps that use the camera can identify the denomination aloud.

“Before a smartphone was accessible we had to carry six different things, and now all of those things are in one of those devices,” Ms. Rush said. “A $150 money reader is now a $1.99 app.”

She added: “These devices are a game-changer. They have created the era of inclusion.”

While some app makers have made great efforts to build products that help people with impairments, other developers overlook the importance of creating assistive components.

Mr. Perez said what he could do now with his smartphone was inconceivable just a few years ago. But even well-known apps like Instagram, which he uses to share some of his photos, do not mark all of their features.

“When some developers design their apps, they don’t label all of their buttons and controls, so the screen reader just says, ‘This is a button,’ but it doesn’t say what the button actually does,” Mr. Perez said. “That’s an area where we need a lot of improvement.”

Sunday, 22 September 2013

Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?

Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?

AMERICANS replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone. Ever wondered what happens to all these old phones? The answer isn’t pretty.

In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry.

Indeed, most scientists agree that exposure poses serious health risks, especially to pregnant women and children. The World Health Organization reports that even a low level of exposure to lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which can be found in old phones) can cause irreversible neurological damage and threaten the development of a child.

The growing toxic nightmare that is e-waste is not confined to third world outposts. It also poses health problems in the United States where, for several years, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has kept inmates busy processing e-waste. There are concrete steps the government, manufacturers and consumers could take to better dispose of electronic trash and to help prevent the pileup of more e-waste and the hazards e-waste processing poses.

The United States, for example, remains the only industrialized country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty that makes it illegal to export or traffic in toxic e-waste. Fully implementing the treaty would be a step toward joining global efforts to contain toxic waste troubles.

The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act, introduced in Congress in 2011, would have made it illegal to export toxic waste from the United States to countries that don’t belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The aim was to stop dumping e-waste on the world’s poorest nations and thus to provide an incentive for safer waste management in our own country. The bill had bipartisan support but was never put to a vote.

The European Union provides a model for industrial regulation that would shift the burden of safe product disposal back to the manufacturers that produce electronic goods. Its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive requires electronic sellers to accept, free of charge, any of their used products brought in by customers for recycling. The goal is to have properly recycled 85 percent of the European Union’s e-waste by 2019. Similarly, Japan requires its electronic manufacturers to establish their own recycling facilities or commission third parties to recycle a range of products, from computers and cellphones to TVs and air-conditioners.

Government or consumer pressure on manufacturers to design electronics with end-of-product-life issues in mind could be enormously helpful. Most cellphones, for example, are deliberately designed to make disassembly difficult. Changes in the way manufacturers glue, screw and solder components together would make it easier to dismantle discarded phones and thus reduce the risks posed by crude recycling techniques like those deployed by Ghanaian children.

THERE are alternative phone service business models that could be beneficial to producers, users and the rest of us. For example, manufacturers could sell products complete with prearranged recycling service or subscriptions that made it possible, for example, for phone user to exchange old units for new ones rather than throwing them away. Under a product service system model, companies recycle old units and repurpose core components. Xerox uses a similar model for its photocopiers, without impact on sales or profits.

In the absence of government regulation or industry initiative, consumers could play a role in determining what happens to products that have outlived their usefulness. Most phones and small electronics are designed with obsolescence in mind. But what if we held on to our gadgets longer and repaired, rather than replaced them? We could recycle the ones we no longer use through certified recycling services like e-Stewards, a nonprofit organization that runs certification programs for e-waste recyclers, ensuring that goods are not improperly exported.

As consumers we need to demand better end-of-life options for our high-tech trash; if manufacturers and government fall down on the job, we, the millions of Americans who own cellphones, should press for safe recycling.

Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist based in Melbourne, Australia.

Saturday, 21 September 2013

How Cellphones Complicate Polling

How Cellphones Complicate Polling

With this election, math again messed with the magic* in a media stalwart. Television pundits, usually with the authority left over from past political victories, turned out to be inferior seers compared to fast-moving analysts armed with a raft of polling data. The Times’s own Nate Silver appears to be the biggest winner of all.

But other math, abetted by technology, could mean trouble down the line for our prognosticating overlords. Traditional polling is getting more expensive and less reliable. The emerging online alternatives are promising, but they have problems of their own. Problems with the polls may also mean problems for the people who read them. (Nate Silver made a comparison of polling accuracy last week.)

The fundamental difficulty has to do with changes in phone technology and human habits. Much of the polling data you see comes from phone calls. Caller identification has made it easier to ignore calls from polling outfits. Cellphones have caller ID, and people are likely to be using them from any number of places where they don’t want to be disturbed.

In May, the Pew Research Center published a report that said that the number of households responding to phone polls had fallen to 9 percent today from 36 percent in 1997. If this trend continues, at some point response rates will be too low to show good representation.

Even if pollers do get through and persuade people to cooperate with an in-depth poll, taking these kinds of surveys to an increasingly mobile population is more expensive. A 1996 federal law states that calls to cellphones must be hand-dialed, not generated by computer. That increases the time required for getting the answers.

A study published last spring looked at an effort by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to survey rents. It found that the cost of obtaining one completed survey ranged from $77.18 for a call to a landline phone to $277.19 for a call to a cellphone.

While it is not clear that this study was a perfect match for the costs of a political poll, it is clear that calling the mobile population is expensive. That makes follow-up and in-depth polls, which are more valuable, less attractive.

“The ultimate question is, how representative are you of the population?” says Michael McDonald, a professor of statistics at George Mason University who studies polling. “I tend to trust organizations that go the extra mile, with personal interviews, calls and multiple callbacks. Fast polls are a strategy if you want to make news, but they aren’t as good.”

One alternative is to rely more on Internet-based surveys, something the pollers at Rasmussen Reports and other outfits already do. Professor McDonald says using Internet data, however, “trades one set of biases for another. We don’t have full Internet coverage, and not everyone uses computers.”

Still, as more people get online, the Internet-based polls get much better. SurveyMonkey, which sells tools for many kinds of collective voting, carried out over several months an online presidential poll that had 96 percent accuracy, compared with the actual results of the vote.

“We looked at nine battleground states over 11 weeks,” said Philip Garland, vice president of methodology at SurveyMonkey. “On the day before Election Day alone, 60,000 people took the survey.”

The cost per person was negligible, he said, and the results may be more illuminating. “We got twice as many ‘don’t knows’ compared with phone or personal surveys,” says Mr. Garland. “When people are asked questions by a person, they feel like they should make a choice.” Still, like other pollers, the online service was surprised at the turnout by Latino and African-American voters, indicating that the survey didn’t perfectly capture the national population.

SurveyMonkey, which didn’t make money from this poll, plans to continue the work for the 2014 midterm elections and will make its data available to the public. “We expect to get a lot of interest from political organizations,” says Mr. Garland.

Just in case you thought this election thing was over.

*Note: A saltier version of the phrase “messed with the magic” was supposedly uttered by an old-media big shot when he first toured Google and learned how its algorithms could make advertising both cheaper and more efficient.

Thursday, 19 September 2013

LG and Samsung now confirmed to announce a flexible display smartphones as early as next week

LG and Samsung now confirmed to announce a flexible display smartphones as early as next week

While there are certainly those that look at the futuristic proposition that flexible displays have going for them rather skeptically, us at PhoneArena are kind of excited. Nerdy at heart, the idea of flexible displays speaks to our inner geek in a way that most 'new' tech simply doesn't. The idea has kept reminding us of what excitement born from true advancements in technology really felt like, and we're definitely not talking about the admittedly essential, but trivial bi-yearly evolution in hardware.

If you are equally enthused about the value proposition of flexible displays, then you've probably been hearing all about how South Korean LG and Samsung are both working real hard to bring this new tech to the masses. As it turns out – when there's smoke, there's also fire, indeed, for both LG and Samsung have now confirmed that they'll be coming out with their respective flexible display offerings.

Starting off with the former, LG has leaked some details about its upcoming LG Z smartphone to ZDNet Korea. The LG Z will feature a curved display, the likes of which we've only seen in TV's so far. According to the new information, LG is already in the mass-production stage and will have the Z ready for announcement by the end of the month. Nothing else has been explicitly confirmed, though it is assumed that the rest of the hardware on the LG Z will be similarly bleeding edge.

Turning to Samsung, the company's Galaxy Note 3 has long been rumored to have a special, limited version that will feature some of the company's YOUM flexible display tech. The latter part has been confirmed by a Samsung official last week, and again in a meeting with reporters earlier today. Unfortunately, there's currently no word on whether we're still talking Note 3 or not, though it seems like the most reasonable choice. The best part? Samsung says it may be announcing the device as early as next week.

Now, before you start tearing strands of hair from your head out of pure joy, do keep in mind that neither of the two will offer a truly flexible smartphone. That's because while the screen is, indeed, flexible, the rest of the components are not. Nevertheless, while this is certainly something to look forward to far into the future, the current applications are still quite exciting. For starters, flexible displays are extremely sturdy, meaning that accidental drops need no longer spell disaster for you and your smartphone. What's even more, due to their thinness, flexible displays may very well hail a new era when a minimum of two days of battery life on a single charge becomes the industry standard, as manufacturers will have more space to fit larger cells, without inflating thickness and, generally, ruining design. Oh, yes, don't even get us started on the design possibilities!