NFB Convention & Blindsquare!

The 2013 convention of the National Federation of the Blind in Orlando has been registered with Blind Square Event, a free version of the popular Blind Square navigation app for iOS devices. We hope that it will help convention attendees navigate the convention area and its surroundings. More information about this app is below.

Chris Danielsen, Director of Public Relations
National Federation of the Blind


BlindSquare Event is a free app that makes use of the latest features available in smartphones to aid the blind and visually impaired during special events held by blindness organizations. BlindSquare Event is available for the iPhone and iPad in the App Store.

When you are at an event that has been registered with the developer of BlindSquare Event and BlindSquare Event has determined your location using your iOS-device’s GPS capabilities, it will look up information about your surroundings on Foursquare and Open Street Map. Employing unique algorithms, it will then ascertain the information most useful to you and speak it in a clear synthetic voice.

You can use BlindSquare Event for example to find a café within a selected radius or to locate the nearest post office or the library. Shake your device to hear your current address, as well as information about the location of the nearest street intersection and venues around you. Track your destination, so BlindSquare Event will periodically announce the distance and direction while you are traveling. Simulate locations to explore their surroundings before you visit them. If you use BlindSquare Event to mark your position, it can help you to find this spot again later. BlindSquare Event possesses filters you can set, so you only hear the information you currently need. Have BlindSquare Event announce streets and saved places only, so you do not get overwhelmed by more information than you need. If you mark your saved places and Foursquare venues as Favorites, BlindSquare Event will always notify you when you reach them. Since BlindSquare Event saves your favorites and your places to iCloud, they get synched between all of your iOS-devices, and you can use BlindSquare Event on all of them.

Although you will need VoiceOver to operate the app, BlindSquare Event uses its own high quality Acapela voices in many different languages to announce information about your environment. This means you will always hear all of the information you need, even when you can't touch the screen of your device, you lock the screen, or you use another app while BlindSquare Event is running in the background.

BlindSquare Event will start working two days before an event begins and will stop working two days after the event has ended. Its use will be limited to a radius of 43 miles or 70 kilometers around the location of the event.

You can download BlindSquare Event from the App Store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bs-event/id635707709?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4
We recommend that you download and install BlindSquare Event while you have access to a wifi network as the app is about 90 mb and when you launch it for the first time, it will download an additional file to install its high quality speech synthesizer. Since BlindSquare Event does not include offline maps, you need an active internet connection while using it.

BlindSquare Event provides the same functionality as the paid version of BlindSquare as long as it is used at the time and location of an event that has been registered with the developer of BlindSquare and BlindSquare Event. Therefore you may listen to this one-hour podcast about BlindSquare to learn more about how to use BlindSquare Event http://www.applevis.com/sites/default/files/podcasts/AppleVisPodcast387.mp3_.mp3 or read the BlindSquare FAQ at http://www.blindsquare.com/faq/.

If you have any questions about BlindSquare event, feel free to write to support@blindsquare.com or tweet @BlindSquareGPS.




Vehicle Donations Take the Blind Further. Donate your car to the National Federation of the Blind today!  For more information, please visit www.carshelpingtheblind.org or call 1-855-659-9314

Christopher S. Danielsen, J.D.
Director of Public Relations
National Federation of the Blind
200 East Wells Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
Office: (410) 659-9314, extension 2330
Mobile: (410) 262-1281
E-mail: cdanielsen@nfb.org
www.nfb.org

---

_______________________________________________