Georgie Phone

A smart phone app to help blind and visu­ally impaired people with daily nav­ig­a­tion around the city
THE CHALLENGE

Roger and Mar­garet Wilson-Hinds, a blind couple from Peter­bor­ough, had developed a range of apps for people who are blind or visu­ally impaired. Geor­gie Phone helps the user to com­plete tasks such as catch­ing a bus, read­ing prin­ted text and pin­point­ing loc­a­tion. The couple were seek­ing fund­ing to deliv­er a test pro­ject in Peter­bor­ough to help mit­ig­ate the anxi­ety felt by blind or visu­ally impaired pas­sen­gers who often don’t know where they are on a jour­ney, or when to get off a bus.

 

THE SOLUTION

A grant from Peter­bor­ough DNA’s Test Bed Fund allowed Geor­gie Phone to acquire 20 smart phones equipped with loc­ally engin­eered bus and taxi apps, to train par­ti­cipants to use the equip­ment and then mon­it­or their bus jour­ney exper­i­ences over a 2 month peri­od.

 

THE RESULTS

Due to the suc­cess of the pro­ject, Geor­gie Phone has been able to scale-up their work and now oper­ates in sev­er­al parts of the coun­try help­ing to improve the mobil­ity of those that are blind or have low vis­ion.
Geor­gie Phone’s excel­lent work has been recog­nised – they were awar­ded the Digit­al Inclu­sion Award at the Made Me Awards in Birm­ing­ham in 2015.