  Visually impaired people are often confronted with new environments and they
find themselves face to face with an innumerous amount of difficulties when
facing these environments. Having to surpass and deal with these difficulties
that arise with their condition is something that we can help diminish. They
are one sense down when trying to understand their surrounding environments and
gather information about what is happening around them. Nowadays, mobile
devices present significant computing and technological capacity which has been
increasing to the point where it is very common for most people to have access
to a device with Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, and both high processing and storage
capacities. This allows us to think of applications that can do so much to help
people with difficulties. In the particular case of blind people, the lack of
visual information can be bypassed with other contextual information retrieved
by their own personal devices. Our goal is to provide information to blind
users, be able to give them information about the context that surrounds them.
We wanted to provide the blind users with the tools to create information and
be able to share this information between each other, information about people,
locations or objects. Our approach was to split the project into a data and
information gathering phase where we did our field search and interviewed and
elaborated on how is the situation of environment perception for blind users,
followed by a technical phase where we implement a system based on the first
stage. Our results gathered from both the collecting phase and our implementing
phase showed that there is potential to use these tools in the blind community
and that they welcome the possibilities and horizons that it opens them.
