It's disappointing to see the cynicism and negativity directed to this announcement. Yes, the presentation is a bit lacking: the website is difficult to read for many and the video seems to be a big ad. But the message is so hopeful. I'm not blind/visually challenged/whatever the correct terminology is, but this announcement/description/advertisement made me happy.

It made me happy not because this is another channel to bring advertisers and consumers together (as others have pointed out) but because it seems like a way to leverage technology to really give help and hope to others.

Is there a reason why Microsoft shouldn't put their branding forward and promote their own devices if they put up money for the research? Apple does this all the time. I hope we take joy in the possibilities of freedom that this technology could provide.

I'm also disappointed by the cynicism and superficial judgement ("bad web design!") that this piece is receiving.

This might be a serious innovation, easing the lives of a (large!) marginalized group. Blindness is a serious disability, and I'm really happy to see Microsoft taking this step. This is actually something that might help people. Can we appreciate that?

I've a feeling most of the HN audience is comprised of people working on websites. Almost every time something shows up, they usually contribute with what they know (css, javascript, design, etc). I've learned to ignore it but it's a bit sad anyway.

It might be worth mentioning that this sort of thing is something Microsoft has cared a lot about for a very long time. I attended the huge, 7,000 attendees unveiling of NT for developers in SF in 1992, and one of the things they did, pretty much orthogonal to the rest of the program, was give us a handout and maybe a CD on accessibility, and strongly urge us to incorporate it in what we developed.

Hating on Microsoft is a lazy way to get "e-cred" regardless of the actual topic. If this was announced and presented the exact same way by Apple it wouldn't receive half of the negativity.

It's absolutely awesome. It beats the typical crap on here about some start-up coming up with a not-really-needed solution to a millienial's already-cushy life.

if the configurability is there, I will happily withdraw my cynicism. I too am happy when I see technology being used in new ways to help people live richer lives.

What bothers me is that the most important part of this project is to get a lot of existing entities to do something for the visual impaired people (e.g. put bluetooth devices everywhere, create sevices to push the information to users), and I feel this part of the project is brushed away in a "we have great ideas, surely everyone will be conviced to make them possible" attitude.

There is already realtime tracking of the train delays where I live, and it just doesn't work (regularly a train will be displayed as arriving to a station, when clearly it's not there, and 5 min after it gets rescheduled). Telling me in nice video that we'll expand this kind of experience to vuses and a lot of other things, and it will help blind people to workaround unexpected things just feels like wild fantasy.

About the other companies, Apple's doesn't advertise feel good prototypes of "boil the ocean" types of projects. They didn't come with a "wouldn't it be great if you could pay for things with our technology ? Imagine if everyone put this beacon everywhere in the world" video telling fluffy stories in advance.

They prototyped the barcode payment system in their shop, you could actually use it with existing devices, and they're pushing their NFC payment with a nationwide partner networks with working payment terminals from the get go, doing the hard work upfront.

'There is already realtime tracking of the train delays where I live, and it just doesn't work'

The important point is not that the data is flawed, it's accessibility to that data. Leveling the playing field.

That the data is already accessible. It has an app, it has a website. If you can use the accessibility features of any smartphone then you have access to it.

The leveling of the playing field you mention is not some moonshot, some dream to hold dear to one's heart. It certainly can still be done better, but it's already done competently.

Should we dismiss ideas because they don't work as intended right now? All I see here is room for improvement. Rarely, if ever, do new approaches work perfectly the first time around, and the problem is especially complex.

Regardless of how Microsoft profits from this, it is still a good idea that could improve the lives of millions of people. If a company can make money while improving the lives of people, that is a good thing for both parties, wouldn't you say?

I think I might be grumpy, but it's hard for me to share the hyperbolism of this PR piece on the importance of the experiment. To put it differently, this PR story should be written when this experiment expends to London as a whole and is ready to actually take the world.

In a way, this is another instance of the "ideas don't matter, implementation does" mantra. It's not their ideas that will change millions of people's life, it's the implementation, and what is presented doesn't seen revolutionary nor reliable nor scalable to me. I'd want to be proven wrong, of course.

Fair enough, thanks for replying.

I'm not sure what's the reason to be cynical here. I'm an iOS developer who uses an Android device personally and I'm loving this new Microsoft (Post Ballmer). This was exactly the wish of developers in 2002, that MS should become contributing OpenSource citizen.

The Roslyn project, F#, Docker integration, MS Band etc clearly show that MS has learned it's lessons and are responsible citizens of OSS world.

Kudos Microsoft.

The MS Band has an open source OS? I must've missed that.

OSS is not the same as 'Open Source Operating System. While I wouldn't say there's much OSS in the Band I think the OP's intent is that Microsoft is being more open

"Plays well with others. We've established partnerships with key service providers who embrace our vision of healthier living. And we're open to even more. Microsoft Health as a platform will be strengthened by broader collaboration from device and service partners. See how connecting to the partners we have today can make your Microsoft Band experience even more amazing."

Just for your last two sentences. No. MS hasn't changed much. They noticed that after losing in mobile, they also started to lose developers as well. So they are just trying to look cute.

I will perhaps re-iterate my thoughts once Ms stop extorting Android device manufacturers for BS software patents. Until then, I am not touching anything from them.

I can't believe I'm defending Microsoft, as I was a hardcore Linux guy back in the days.

To answer your question, Microsoft is not only about mobile. Their work on Roslyn compiler, F#, Reactive Extensions, SignalR, ASP.Net vNext etc is high quality open source. Moreover if they make their tools open and play nice with Android/iOS etc, we all win, right?

The site is unreadable.

Here is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEzncMLLOxE

I don't know, I found the audio combined with the text & images incredibly engaging, although I did wish for a visual cue from time to when I lost my place (I was reading in sync, but got distracted).

Perhaps it worked better on your browser, but the content was so delayed that many times I scrolled past it before it decided to load. So I was constantly having to scroll back and forth to try to figure out whether a blank spot was truly blank (sometimes it was). Pretty frustrating. And the irony is almost too much...

I can read perfectly well. But if the web site I'm looking at is so badly designed that it's unreadable, why should I expect that an audio version will be better thought out?

There are perfectly good reasons for providing audio content on a web site, but having a badly designed site isn't one of them.

I think he GP was referring to visually impaired people, per the post they were responding to (about the "irony", etc.).

I had no problems reading it.

I only see a lot of lines stretching up and down, left and right and sometimes some images and some text appears randomly here and there. It's difficult to know where do I need to stop scrolling in order to continue reading. I understand if some images take some time to load, I would wait for them to load if I had something to read. Having to wait a couple of seconds looking at an empty page while the text is loading? Come on, 14400 modems were faster than this page.

I was a little confused by the complaints, because it worked great for me on Firefox Mobile 33 (ignoring the sloppy editing that resulted in one paragraph appearing twice, search for the phrase "blue whale").

Then I tried again on a desktop. Well, crap.

Resize your browser window until the site switches to tablet mode if you want to read it.

They do provide an audio version.

Thanks, I came to the comment section here looking for a txt version.

I think it was a great presentation of the material. I enjoyed all of it except I think that the audible clicking went on a little too much of the page scroll.

I got some text to show by scrolling down past a bunch of animations and then scrolling up again.

My one quibble with the article is that calling Reading a suburb of London is quite misleading. I understand (North?) Americans use the word differently to Europeans on the whole, but Reading is a Medieval town with a net commuter flow inwards - it's the local hub of economic activity, and is the largest town (it hasn't got city status) in the UK.

For context, in terms of its economy, size, distance from London etc, it's not much different to calling Oxford <edit>or Windsor</edit> a suburb of London.

We often call smaller city's suburbs of larger ones. DC 'suburbs' extend out 60+ miles and include several mid-sized city's. "Greater Metropolitan area" is often a better term. EX: Fairfax city is in a similar location relative to DC and takes 1h 20min to get their by subway, it's also inside fairfax county which has ~1Million people. However, large numbers of people commute from west of Fairfax into DC.

So IMO, it's consistant when you look at overall traffic / commuter flows.

I think the term loses a lot of meaning if used just for the same distances in the UK as in the US. Particularly because the main consensus for 'suburb' seems to be that it's a residential area, which the commuter flows suggest that Reading is not. Perhaps the best benchmark is merely whether a place is treated as a sub-district (albeit far-flung) of a city? I'd say that doesn't apply to Reading, but perhaps the same is true of Fairfax.

Your final remark is a little confusing - what is consistent looking at commuter flows? You mentioned that large numbers of people commute from west of Fairfax into DC, and I said Reading has a net influx of commuters. Those statements don't directly contradict each other, but certainly don't explicitly agree!

Suppose 100k people live in fairfax and 150k people work in fairfax. That's a net influx. But if 300k people commute though fairfax IMO that point's to it being part of a larger collective.

This really bothered me in the article too, though I'd always assumed Reading was a city (it certainly _feels_ like one!) - thanks for the info on that

Terrible web design for those of us with a vision impairment.

And for those of us with perfect vision.

Or those of us that read fast.

Or period. People, please, stop doing that.

Yeah, the irony that is for people with vision impairment and that site is hard to read and navigate is strong

My vision is fine and I still had trouble with that site, enough that I closed it early. Terrible scrolling and delayed loading ruined that experience.

They are talking about helping blind people and you are talking about terrible scrolling and closing the website?

Maybe they are trying to make those of us who are sighted experience the hardships of being unable to understand what is being communicated to us?

They could've just showed nothing and had an audio file on there, then. Or apply a CSS blur over everything.

Complaints about the website aside, this technology is great and is exactly the type of thing microsoft needs to be developing.

This is great I wish more large corps were putting money into stuff like this. its a real problem and without realizing business and some awesome tech will come out of it.

My sister-in-law recently became blind after many years of declining sight. It is heartbreaking to see how difficult even the most seemingly simple journeys have become for her. (And I'm quite impressed by the way that she has been pushing herself, even though it's clearly quite difficult for her.)

I think that the video is a bit too optimistic about how easy it can be for blind people to walk around. But I also think that the idea -- using a combination of smart phones, Bluetooth and Wifi markers, and headphones -- is a very clever one, and is a very good start.

It is going to take decades for such a technology to become stable and mature. But I'm impressed and pleased to see Microsoft investing in such technologies.

Oh, and are they hinting that there might be ads aimed at blind people? Yes. I don't know how that is any different from Google offering "free" e-mail and search in exchange for ads. My metric for whether this is worthwhile isn't whether Microsoft puts up ads, but rather whether blind people benefit.

"a reminder you're walking by a place with great Chinese takeout"

is this just a way to target ads at people with a disability? if all I'm trying to do is get form point A to point B, the last think I want is "interesting facts about history" or targeted ads.

I didn't even consider the possible nefariousness of it, but you have a point.

Although, you could also make the case that stores have signs (sometimes neon!) for sighted people, so this is just providing the closest equivalent experience to the blind. Yeah, it's not perfectly comparable, since sighted people can choose what they look at mostly, while none of us get to direct our hearing to only one source of sound.

Such a system would have to provide the user options as to what they want to hear, from the (-v) bare minimum safety warnings (curb, crosswalk, etc.) to (-vv) a more comprehensive description of the terrain and items around you, all the way up to (-vvv) a constant play-by-play chatter of everything it knows about your location, direction, and destination.

It could be an incentive for shop owners to install such a beacon, thus increasing their frequency and improving the system. I doubt they would be ads, but rather just the name of the store and maybe some sort of rating reference or something.

>"I doubt they would be ads, but rather just the name of the store and maybe some sort of rating reference or something." //

That sounds like an advert to me. Shop owners will consider the ROI, if they think there are enough blind people with such a device that will be attracted in to spend by use of this system they'll get it. It's an advert, like a shop window display, surely.

People with good eyesight gain instant knowledge by looking around. This seems like a wonderful way to bring that sort of experience to a person unable to see. It sounds great!

What if you're travelling? Or just exploring a tourist area.

Narrow demographic, but seems more useful in that case.

Great story, and a neat device that, in my opinion, has a better consumer electronics future than Google Glass.

I'm impressed with the scope and maturity of the concept they're presenting here. Small attempts at improving usability of the world for the visually impaired have always been kinda cool -- things like chirping walk-signal actuators at crosswalks -- but have always been disparate and half-baked. It'd be remarkable if Microsoft's mass and momentum behind a system like this could be implemented on a large scale in a city to demonstrate how beneficial a fully baked system can be.

And, to fuel the fire, the page design was top-notch, except for the random 2-column blocks which seem an interesting choice given the nature of variable screen sizes.

IMO the biggest news about it is MS putting their clout behind it. A blind friend of mine told me a few years ago already he participated in some kind of experiment with mobile navigation. He then preferred his own ears and guide dog. But then, this was just before the smartphone revolution really took off, and we got ubiquitous Internet all over the place. I think right now is a better moment than back then.

While I'm here I still do want to complain about the website :P Why? Because it stressed me out. There's no reason a webpage should go out of their way to do that. It made me nervous how much of the text+pictures only started to fade in as I already scrolled halfway past it. Why does it even need to fade at all? It's already scrolled in and out of view. I guess this is an example of how, with normal pages, everybody has their own customary way of navigating the information, and as designers take more and more control of that experience, it's going to cause friction and differences. I can imagine how this could match someone's particular way of interacting with a page, but it's not mine. I stopped reading halfway through as it was stressing me out (I didn't need this before my first coffee was yet to kick in).

Regardless, as everyone is screaming, let's pay attention to this great project, helping blind people.

From what I've seen, iPhone is the de facto standard of mobile phones for visually impaired for now, because its VoiceOver function is pretty well made, and more importantly, its UI experience is far less varied than its competitors, i.e. Windows Phones and Androids. It has already a strong community and support from organizations like AFB. I hope this bring them a more healthy competition among the tech companies.

This could be a prototype project where three or four routes in one or two cities will be enhanced with bluetooth, a dozen of test subjects will try it on a refular basis, a few articles in the news will appear praising this visionnary concept and two months later everybody forgets about it.

Or it could be a proof of concept of a much wider plan, and from the results we would see the start of a massive undertaking involving huge swaths of cities clearing budget to put a bluetooth beacon on every street corner, public transport infrastructure is massively updated to have up to date realtime data accessible from the mobile apps In a usable format, shop owner and public facilities join the movement to enhanced their places for discoverability.

If this was an IBM project partenaring a metropolitan city council, I would be expecting the later. It's a Microsoft story centering on the technological aspect of it, I guess it's the former.

A good reminder that there are novel implementations of existing technology (mobile devices, beacons) that can markedly improve the lives of those with disabilities.

It will take a huge amount of beacons to make this useful. But a worthy cause and an interesting solution. Let's wait and see if anything comes out of it.

This has got to be the first article I've read that has incorporated ambient sound. The loop is terrible, but it's still pretty awesome! The coconuts were annoying though.. I hope more articles introduce ambient sound... I'm imagining this being integrated into novels.

Also, this is fantastic. I can totally see this being of interested to the sighted as well; maybe it would see better uptake than glass.

That's what I was thinking about - inner-ear bluetooth stereo headset that does the basics like notification pings, but perhaps also act as a 6th sense, things like navigation cues so you can use your navigation app on your bicycle without blocking your hearing or looking at your phone.

Also think self-tours. People could setup tours around places like Rome and vote them up. You load it up, then walk around the city getting tips on the hot spots and history. I believe there is a lot of potential for this sort of contextual audio cuing.

Hmm, you just thought of this, Microsoft didn't.

It says more about you than it does about Microsoft.