2009-06-22-Accessible GPS
Seminars@Hadley
Accessible GPS Overview and Comparison
Presented by
Michael May
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
June 23, 2011
Dawn TurcoGreetings again everyone, this is Dawn Turco. And today’s seminar is Accessible GPS Overview and Comparison. And let me first welcome everyone to today’s seminar and before introducing our speaker, I want to also announce that today is the first time Hadley has offered a seminar at Hadley for continuing education hours;so some of you who have registered for today’s seminar will be interested in taking the quiz and acquiring the certificate as documentation of having successfully the continuing education event today.
The quiz will become available approximately 15 minutes after the seminar is aired today, and for those of you taking that quiz, you are allowed two opportunities to pass the quiz with a grade of 70 or better. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to have to re-register and go through the fee and process again.
You have seven days from the failed attempt to go ahead and try again, but once you have passed, a certificate will be issued electronically only, and it will be in pdf format, and you will do that after the quiz, and we ask that you just complete a short survey to give us feedback on the seminar for credit.
If you did not register for credit today, but are interested in doing so, you certainly can go back and do that at a later time, either today or when the seminar recording is posted; and we typically get those up on our past seminars page within about 48 hours of the event. So if you want to pass the word on to others, that this opportunity is there for them, the past seminars page would be the place to go for a list of approved seminars for continuing education hours.
Today’s is for two continuing education hours, and for those of you who are interested it is ACVREP approved. That’s important because I wanted to let you know that today’s topic was the number one choice of topics that we took from a nationwide survey that we did with O&M specialists. When asked what topics are they most interested, and what would most meet their continuing education needs, GPS led the list.
So that brings us to Accessible GPS Overview and Comparison with today’s speaker. And today’s speaker is Michael May. Michael May joins us today from the Sendero Group and will be presenting on all things GPS, what are the strengths and weaknesses of GPS, the differences between the various systems and how to best integrate GPS into the way finding equation.
And I am going to, like you, sit back and listen to today’s presentation and wait for an opportunity for questions. In the meantime, I am handing the microphone over to Mike May; Mike, welcome so much and thank you for today’s presentation.
Michael May
Dawn, it’s great to be here. Having lots of experience with these chat sessions, I may lock down the “talk” key to give myself hands free from time to time, but I’ll also let up just briefly, so that somebody can jump in and say we’re not hearing you, or you’re distorted, or whatever is going on. But hopefully we won’t have to deal with too much of that, just depending on our internet connection.
It’s great to have such an incredible turnout, I think of the trouble that it takes to fly places to many way finding seminars over the years, and I fly some place, stay a couple nights in a hotel and probably don’t get 40, 50 participants in person. So it’s an amazing advancement in technology and I applaud Hadley for being on the forefront here, not only in terms of the technology, but getting the word out, because that’s half the battle to make sure that people are aware of the opportunity.
A bit more about my background in terms of GPS, I’m going to go through some of the preliminary stuff here pretty quickly, assuming that most people know it. I’ve been working on GPS since 1994 and initially with Arkenstone, and then starting Sendero Group in 2000 along with some other blind folks.
I’ve been teaching seminars as a visiting professor, a visiting scholar at Western Michigan University a couple times. I’ve taught these seminars around the world, and most importantly done a lot of individual training of groups and of individuals, so you learn a lot more when you’re one on one, and you get feedback from people as far as what they’re understanding, what’s valuable to them in terms of what they need to learn about GPS; so that’s been real useful. And a big part of how the GPS technology has evolved comes from direct input from user.
I’ve just started with Atlas Talking Map Program at Arkenstone in 1995, and the first year that was launched, we had a 45-city tour and went around and did in-person demonstrations of that technology at agencies all over the country, probably one or two of you might have been present for those. So the technology has evolved a long way.
In my earlier seminars, I used to have to explain what GPS was, that may be on your quiz, so I’ll just tell you briefly and assume that you know, or you’ll ask if you don’t know any technicalities about the GPS itself.
The main thing to know is that it primarily works outside, it can work inside with some of the newer receivers that are getting more and more sensitive, but you don’t count on that, you certainly don’t tell your students or clients that it will work inside. If it does, it’s an extra bonus, but assume that it doesn’t.
There are 24 satellites at least that are circumnavigating the earth, so you get up to 12, I’ve never seen 12, but a few people have told me they’ve seen on their receivers, it will announce how many satellites you’re getting; if you’re getting 10 or 11, you’re doing pretty well. You need three or four, really three minimum to get any kind of position fix, triangulation, or as it’s really technically called, trilateration.
I was talking about the background of GPS, and where things have come, where they are today, and the satellites and GPS positioning itself. As I said you can count on it working outside, you can get up to 12 satellites, you need at least three or four to get a decent position fix. What I’m going to talk to you about in terms of this GPS accuracy, map data accuracy and some of the other components are really the things that you need to know more than the individual commands on a particular product.
You may want to learn the product if you have access to it, that’s great, but the priority really is that you convey the basic concepts to a student and they can then learn the individual commands and so forth. They can be the expert on the unit itself. It’s your job, if you’re an O&M instructor to guide them through safe use of the GPS to learn it in a fashion, in a systematic way that promotes them to getting over the frustrating initial period and to the point where it’s actually useful.
I’m thinking of my own experience in this learning curve that I went through this weekend just to give you a little bit of a comparison, and you might have something in your background that you can think of when you’re learning a new piece of technology. Learning the new touch screen on the iPhone, for me it was both exhilarating and frustrating, and I think this is what you’re going to face in teaching people with GPS.
There are ah-ha moments when somebody discovers something they didn’t know was in their own neighborhood before that are really powerful and that person developing the motivation to get through the frustration part. In the case of the iPhone, it’s for the first time as of Friday, it has a touch screen interface, and I mention this because it also might be relevant at some point for a blind person, it’s a way’s off, but it’s a start in terms of a different kind of user interface than we’re used to with keypads.
The way it works on a touch screen is you move your finger around whatever is under that finger speaks, so if you’re over contacts, or GPS or calendar it says calendar, you hold your finger on that item and then you tap the screen with a separate finger and it’s like clicking on it, and it launches that thing. That part is very cool.
The frustrating part is when you try to enter letters, so you run your finger over the screen and you’re doing the equivalent of hunt and peck, and then you tap the screen, you enter the letter, and if you make mistake, you’ve got to backspace, there’s all this stuff, and as I went through it, I thought this is probably what people experience when they first are learning GPS, there is so much information, there is so much location information that they aren’t used to with this brand new rubric, it’s often a challenge for people. Some people get it quicker than other people.
But I’m telling you this because the main, one of the most valuable things you can do is get people turned on to the technology. That’s really your job. Get them fired up.
Talk about situations where it’s really useful, in fact, it’s really useful to everybody. A lot of people think who is the GPS for; oh, it’s for super travelers. My feeling really is that it’s for weaker travelers, because super travelers will find a way to get there no matter what, we all know people like that. But what about the people who are directionally challenged, blind or sighted, this is where GPS really comes into a valuable place in one of the tools in our bags of tricks.
If you haven’t had a chance to see it, check out a video that we put together, it’s on the Sendero Group website that talks exactly about this idea and does it in kind of a fun way in terms of the tools in our bag of tricks. And in that tool you’ll see images of a dog flying out of the toolbox, a cane, and then of course some GPS devices. But these are all tools that we use and the better we use the tools, the better we get around and take advantage of the information.
It’s always important, I assume people know this, but it’s important to point out to you and to your students that GPS is for orientation, it’s not for mobility. Don’t even think about using it without a cane or a dog. Those are mobility devices that determine what’s in front of you.
The GPS might be able to tell you, if you’ve put it into the database, that’s there a tree with an overhang coming up, but it’s not for that purpose. It’s not for telling you where there’s a curb or a hole or a person, or anything to do with obstacles. And that’s important to get across to people up front.
It’s just like when you get a dog guide, some people think well I’m just going to sleep now and let the dog do the driving. We all know that isn’t true, it doesn’t work with a dog, it doesn’t work with GPS, you’ve got to pay attention, and it’s up to the user to take advantage of the technology.
Going beyond what is GPS, which is ubiquitous worldwide, there’s no charge for it, it’s really an amazing system in terms of the technology. There have been a few other systems talked about being implemented and one in the former Soviet Union, one in Europe, those have lost funding or lost momentum, and the US based GPS system is really the one being used worldwide and although legally, technically, the military can shut down the GPS, there’s so much use of it for commercial and for consumer applications, it’s highly unlikely that would happen. It didn’t happen even over 9/11; it’s not likely to happen under any other circumstance either.
In terms of getting back for a second to this idea of the value of GPS and the location information, and this is something that you want to think about, because it could come up in a test, it’s something you really know, location information is on par with reading literacy. In fact, I’ve proposed just such a topic on the literacy conference in the fall.
We always hear about reading literacy and Braille literacy, location literacy is equally important and this takes a number of different formats, knowing how things are spelled, if you’ve never seen a sign, you might think it’s simple, but it’s important to know how things are spelled because it conveys a professional, an intelligent image about somebody if they know how to spell something or if they don’t.
Is it critical to know that Krispy Kreme donuts are spelled with “Ks”? Maybe not, but it’s symbolic of knowing the bigger picture as far as how a lot of things are spelled, towns, different businesses and so forth. So that location literacy is important from that standpoint, but more important from the standpoint of being able to walk down a street and know what your options are, know what your choices are.
All the GPS systems that we’re going to talk about today do this in different fashions, they have different user interfaces, but the basic concept is the same. You’re getting the information that’s relative to your particular location, it could be 10 feet away, it could be a mile away, but it’s relative to your location. And that’s why we call it location literacy. Knowing about your environment gives you options.
I’d made a case that in fact location literacy is important in terms of job hunting, if there is any rehabilitation counselors in this group, sometimes it comes to your attention that is justifiable as a tool that’s necessary for a job, a scanner is, a screen reader is, what about GPS, and some counselors will say well, no, it’s not really important, because the person can get to work, we’ll have an O&M instructor show them how to get to work and home, and that’s all they need to know.
It’s important because of choices and knowing what other businesses are around, finding a home that’s near transportation, a job that’s near transportation, that’s near a grocery store, all of these location items go into a productive and happy job situation, and they also give you the opportunity to find a new job, to develop an understanding of your environment, and what other companies are around, and doing this whole location search when you’re trying to get a job and navigate in that new environment is very important and GPS is a tool for doing that. It’s not just – it used to be thought of just as a device to get you from Point A to Point B, but that’s not all there is to it.
I think of GPS with two different components; one is this idea of just get me to where I’m going, I don’t care what’s in between because I’m sleeping, or I’m listening to a book or whatever, and that might be something that’s the case one day. Another day you might just be more in a strolling mode, and so there’s what we call look around capabilities.
Now, this is important because some of the GPS devices are really geared more for get me from Point A to Point Z, and they don’t focus so much on location information. Other devices use the location information or what we call look around capabilities, and I’m going to pause for just a second here, and see I can – my computer has rebooted so give me a minute to see if I can get back in directly.
Dawn Turco
Thank you Mike. Mike is rejoining the room, and I’m keeping him on the phone temporarily, but we’re going to hope his mic will be able to continue through the seminar room; let’s give it a go Mike, I’m releasing the microphone just in case you can pick it up.
Michael May
It’s always important to have back-up and that’s true with GPS as well, you know batteries run out, sometimes the data is not as accurate as we would like, there’s all those things so no O&M person is out of a job yet. This is a long way from being that accurate, so we’d like to have it as an augmentation to people’s skills and other capabilities, but it’s not the only tool in the toolbox for sure.
So we’re talking about the importance of this information which you get with it in the value and this value additive is so important to tell the user, so they can get over the hump. One of the interesting things that I think you should also convey to people is the power of getting lost, and that may seem a little bit odd, but I’ve long promoted the idea that GPS is more valuable for helping you get un-lost, and that it necessarily is getting you from one point to another point.
What it really does is it allows you to go exploring and there’s an important component that makes that more fun if somebody can possibly get this into their psyche, it’s the idea of solving a puzzle. If you get lost, you get to solve a puzzle to get un-lost. If you don’t get lost, it’s not as much fun.
Now, this depends on whether you really need to be somewhere on time, if it’s a safe neighborhood, there’s a lot of practical components to this. But most people use common sense and they’ll get themselves lost, or go exploring, if you prefer, when it’s appropriate, not when it’s inappropriate. So this puzzle-solving aspect of GPS is really amazing.