Currently, there are more than 285 million visually impaired people worldwide. While they can go from place to place, they have no awareness of what’s passed on the way. Guide dogs help, but they are trained to avoid obstacles, not find new places.

To solve this, we developed a solution for the Guide Dogs Association of the Blind that combined smartphone accessibility with a global database of location information. The result was Guide Dots, an audio guide that users interact with via Android’s 'explore by touch' functionality. With 1 tap, a button is read aloud; double-tapping then activates the last button the user heard, providing a user experience optimized for the visually impaired.

This free app uses location data from Google Places and Facebook Nearby with proprietary crowd-sourced GPS locations. Guide Dots calls out locations and intersections, finds friends who have checked in nearby, and informs users about special offers.

Uploaded to the Google Play store on 16 April 2014, Guide Dots provided the Guide Dogs Association of the Blind with a powerful tool to give greater independence to the visually impaired.

Built as a complement to guide dogs and canes, the location data from Google Maps and Facebook allows users to explore and discover anywhere in the world.

As user MyRae Migliazzo explains, “[Guide Dots] gives me information about what’s nearby and what’s changed… It gives me the same ability I would have if I was walking with a partner.”

And with crowd-sourced GPS tagging and Beacon technology, the app is poised to evolve and become richer in detail as more people use it.

“With Guide Dots, independence comes the more you use it,” Migliazzo said. “Independence just becomes second nature.”

Available in the Google Play store, the Association has made Guide Dots available to groups supporting the visually impaired around the world.

First developed in Beta and shortlisted in the 2013 Cannes Innovation category, Guide Dots has been fully built out and launched on Android, where it could help the most people because of the platform’s greater global download rate and lower hardware costs.

Developers built Guide Dots through the Android Studio with Java. To ensure the app worked globally, developers tapped into GPS data from the Google Maps API, Facebook Nearby API, GeoNames API and Beacon technology. Additionally, the app uses Android capabilities for speech synthesis, voice recognition and accessibility.

To house geo-tagged location data, a custom database was built in Parse.

The user experience was built on insights of how the visually impaired use phones. Large buttons make the app easy to navigate and aid in developing muscle memory. And a hierarchy of buttons was created based on use frequency — the most used were made bigger and easier to access.