Blindness/Low Vision

Item Description

Explore, discover, and enjoy your neighborhood and beyond with the Nearby Explorer app from the American Printing House for the Blind.

Nearby Explorer is a full-featured GPS app designed for use by people who are blind. Nearby Explorer uses GPS and your phone’s compass to speak real-time information about your surroundings. It also displays maps on the screen that provide audio feedback with touch. The program enhances its onboard data with Google Places™ business listings and Foursquare® (iOS only), if you have a mobile network connection.

Instead of just providing directions, it describes the environment in ways comparable to reading signage or observing road characteristics. It includes complete maps for the United States and Canada covering millions of points of interest (POIs). These include both typical items like street name and address and specialized options like approaching streets, intersection configurations and nearby places and the distance and direction to them. All announcements are optional, so you control how much information Nearby Explorer is giving you.

Geobeam Feature

Since your device knows your current location and the location of POIs around you, you can point it toward features in your environment and receive feedback about them. Think of this feature as a virtual “beam” emitting from the end of your device that “scans” your environment! This feature requires a device with a compass.

Transit Feature

Nearby Explorer includes a transit feature that provides detailed mass transit schedules for over 60 metropolitan areas in the U. S. and Canada. It treats transit stops just like favorites and points of interest by announcing their name and relative position as you move, but in addition, transit stops add next vehicle stop time, direction of travel, and route name to the announcements. You can use the transit schedules to look up times or even follow a route. You may virtually move to any area in the U.S. or Canada and explore the road network, search, or use the transit maps for that area. For complete details about Nearby Explorer, see http://tech.aph.org/ne

Item Special Note

Nearby Explorer requires an iPhone running iOS 9.0 or later with at least 4.2 GB of free space on which to store downloaded maps. When the GPS chip is in use, such as when using Nearby Explorer, battery consumption is significantly increased. It is usually necessary to plug in the device if using it on a long trip where the GPS is in use for more than several hours at a time.

Must redeem by June 1, 2017