Results and Effectiveness

In 3 months, Guide Dots has: • Enhanced the lives of users in more than 57 countries • 16.2 minutes per session on average (188% above average Android app session times) And with over 6,218 crowdsourced locations added and more locations adding Beacons, Guide Dots is poised to evolve as more people use it. Guide Dots also attracted global praise, including from Reuters, MSN and Contagious I/O, and from the visually impaired community, with 72.7% of users polled agreeing that, "GDAB enhances my quality of life". This has already translated to greater awareness and support for Guide Dots, guide dogs and GDAB.

Creative Execution

Guide Dots combines location data from Google Maps API, Facebook Nearby API, GeoNames API and Beacon technology (which allows indoor accessibility) with proprietary crowd-sourced GPS locations to “paint” a picture of the user’s surroundings. Guide Dots calls out locations and intersections, finds friends who have checked in nearby, and informs users about special offers, opening up the user’s world. The app was launched on Android, because of the platform’s greater global download rate and lower hardware costs. Years of research and testing over three continents was undertaken to develop a user experience that made sense for the visually impaired. The app used large buttons, with the most used buttons made bigger and easier to access. Guide Dots also leveraged on Android accessibility features familiar to the visually impaired, such as speech synthesis, voice recognition, and “explore by touch”, which narrates buttons with one tap, and activates them with two.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

For the more than 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, losing their sight also means losing their independence because they have to rely on others to get where they’re going and to learn what’s around them. Guide dogs help them go from place to place safely, but they’re not trained to tell you about the places you’re passing by. To help Guide Dogs Association of the Blind improve the quality of life of not just its clients but also the visually impaired everywhere, we started by asking: what if technology could help the visually impaired “see”? We combined smartphone accessibility with location data to create Guide Dots, a free audio-based discovery app with accessibility features (e.g. Android’s “explore by touch”) specifically for the visually impaired. It’s a powerful tool designed to complement guide dogs and white canes to give greater independence to the visually impaired.