I often see well-meaning sighted people who come in here and want to build this device that will revolutionize the way we interact with our environments. I read these posts, and the first thought that goes through my mind is, why? Why do we need high tech options for simple aspects of life? Well, I got to thinking about things, and I've come up with one area that might put a few programmers to work if they'd be willing to try something, though it's not exactly to do with navigation.

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We do have accessible ways to get weather information. From using digital assistants to the stock weather apps and even some 3rd party apps, like Weather Gods. That's great, and I do make use of them. But I'd like to have more. I would like a way to be able to accessibly read the weather radar, and I've got some preliminary thoughts as to how it might be done.

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let's start by putting my assumptions on the table, because this will alter things if they tend not to be correct. Having never had sight good enough to be able to read a weather radar map, my assumptions are thus. First, that the map includes city and state names as well as draws the geographical border lines. Second, that temperature and other information is shown where it significantly differs from surrounding regions. Next, there is a way to mark storms of varying natures, from developing to full out storm cell. Then, we have a projection of the course that meteorologists think the storm will take.

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Assuming that information is correct, here are my ideas. On iOS, there is a feature in VoiceOver that lets you walk through the streets on a map. You just find the street name and pause your finger over it until you hear a sound. Then, you can move your finger along the screen to get an idea of the path the street runs. So, taking inspiration from that, what if we were able to swipe around on the screen or explore it to find hot spots. If we found the location of a storm, we could then pause over it which would trigger a mode in which we could follow the projected course.

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We could have two sort of looping drone or pad sounds, similar to how Seeing AI does with it's explore photo mode. One could be a lower sound, that indicates you're not moving in the direction of the projected path, and the other meaning you're within the projected path. Also while dragging, it would be good to hear the cities and states or provinces your finger crosses over.

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In such cases that we're tracking a big storm cell, it might be necessary to have a sort of panning view that starts to move automatically as our finger nears the edge of the screen. Though we would need some way of knowing that it's happening. Perhaps a series of clicks to indicate the speed that we're panning over the map. The closer the finger to the edge of the screen, the faster it moves.

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I started thinking about this when the hurricanes slammed into Louisiana. I was thinking that it might be good to have some idea as to the path it would take, not just a general idea as to direction. But I think this could work for things as mundane as a summer thunder banger as well as tornados and so forth.