I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc… neat!
EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we’re discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.
Let me guess, absolutely proprietary?
spits
There is something so fucking sinister about public infrastructure relying on closed source accessibility tools.
You make a simple app and the company pays you small fee every time a scan results in a purchase. You also sell users’ data because you obviously track all of that. Now companies selling accessibility products can target the customer with ads. Success!
It’s easier than applying for grants, and no one seems to mind this kind of economy. It’s just a win/win. This is, it actually helps the visually impaired, and no one seems to care about being tracked or installing an app. “So what’s the problem?” /s?
It could have just been a QR code that links to a web page, but then who’s going to pay for it? Back to begging for grant money. I work with a non-profit. Applying for grants is a full time job. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The vast, vast majority of open source projects are doing just fine without any grants.
Oh, I thought this was a joke.
Yeah but no. I think, in a way, they’re having your phone’s camera assist you if you can’t see well.
Yeah, it looks like it’s both more detailed navigation for sighted people, and geared towards helping people with difficulty seeing.
Wish it didn’t look like to be a proprietary code format, since that severely limits it’s viability as a widespread thing.
Seems like it should at least be embossed, have some sort of texture cue no??
oh is that what these are? I saw something like this on a train station in Boston the other day, assumed it was some new kind of QR code or something
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QR codes are rarely contentful themselves, they are almost always just a URL pointing to the real content.
It’s done this way because URLs are smaller, and you can update the content without needing to go around replacing all the QR code stickers.
Of course, but QR codes work when the server of the company that printed them goes down. If cloud.navilens.com ever goes down, every single code they generated will be broken forever.
If cloud.navilens.com ever goes down, every single code they generated will be broken forever.
And this is virtually guaranteed to happen before too long, leaving tons of useless technicolor QR codes as monuments to the endeavor.
I don’t know how the company is doing, but I do find it strange how large their team is (based on their website) for a service selling QR codes.
Then again, they do seem to have received government/EU grants, so perhaps they’ll be able to stick around that way. If the company does go down, there’s no reason why they couldn’t release a database of every (last known) data point so you can use the app offline for the codes that have stuck around.
A graceful shutdown is possible, and in my opinion, should be contractually obligated under escrow for a company to receive public funds like this.
It seems to me like they do more than just generate QR codes that download a static document. They’ve built out software that helps the visually impaired navigate pedestrian and transit infrastructure. The software seems pretty complex, beyond what a city would likely have the expertise or budget to build from scratch on its own.
You point out the key weakness to the whole approach (dependency on a single third party). Though I suspect that the content in question is also hosted by NaviLens, so the codes would still stop working if they ever shut down.
Just taking a look at their website, it seems to me that NaviLens’ value proposition isn’t just “codes that download a document”, but an entire framework for building and presenting essential documentation in a way that is accessible to people with vision impairments. I can see why it would be cheaper and more effective for a city to buy a service like this than to hire their own software developers and accessibility experts to build out their own bespoke system.
It certainly beats an independent system for every single city or service, but the chosen design limits the functionality of the tags once the service shuts down. You can’t archive the codes, and you can’t generate your own like you can with QR codes.
Had they color-coded their own special ID around a normal QR code with a URL, I wouldn’t have had as much of an issue with these. They actually do have such a system, but they advertise it as an alternative rather than the default.
QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.
These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.
They provide a QR+ Navi combination that solves exactly that. When the company goes bankrupt (or gets bought out by Google and shut down), the city can still provide useful information. You can get Navi codes with a fallback URL for non-Navi scanners.
GPS+gyro+camera access can be done by an (archivable) web application as well, but I suppose Navi is incentivised to not offer any non-app fallback so they can charge a subscription for their services.
In Madrid a lot of bus stops has these signs to help people to know when the bus will arrive by scanning it.
I’m disappointed the London underground is using this proprietary thing, rather than QR codes, which have existed forever and are an open standard.
Thats cool & looks useful for alot of people. Type of app my grandma would use for fine print on products.
I hope the doomers didnt get you down too much. Open source is great, but options like this are still better than nothing :)
I looked them up after seeing them on trams in Melbourne.
