India West remembers what it was like to see. She was born with full vision, but lost it at about 4 years old when a benign brain tumor tangled with her optic nerve. A 22-hour-surgery saved her life, but took away most of her sight.

“I wasn’t used to walking through the world in the dark,” said West, 17. “It was really scary, not knowing how to rely on my other senses.”

In the years since, some vision has returned. She tests at 20/400 on the doctor’s office eye chart. That’s right at the border of severe and profound visual impairment. West can see the sky, she says, and make out light and dark. She can identify things around her house. She uses a cane to navigate. But she can’t see faces or facial expressions. She can’t tell colors. She can’t read words on a computer screen.

Much of the world remains closed off to West, and to the visually impaired community as a whole. It doesn’t have to be that way, say West and her mother, Elena Kaltsas. In an effort to help change the status quo this past semester, West worked with students at the University of Michigan to develop technologies to make life easier for the visually impaired.

Once a week, she traveled from Clonlara Academy in Ann Arbor to David Chesney’s Software Engineering class, EECS 481, a senior-level course on U-M’s North Campus. Chesney, an instructor in computer science and engineering, is known around campus for his Gaming for the Greater Good initiative. For nearly a decade, he’s been combining video game development, software engineering, and altruism—teaching his students to use their skills to benefit diverse populations.

At first, students focused solely on video game development, but several years ago, he expanded the scope. Now, each semester they work with groups of children or individuals with disabilities to make technologies tailored to meet their needs. Chesney has involved people with autism, cerebral palsy, Bell’s palsy and now visual impairment. He and his students see those who agree to work them as clients.

The instructor knew West was a good fit for the role when she called him “Dave” the first time they met. She addressed him that way all semester, even while his students called him Dr. Chesney.

West worked with Chesney’s class to develop technologies for the blind. She owned the room, even if she found it hard to navigate.

“Dave really knows how to make this classroom complicated,” West muttered one afternoon as she moved from project to project.

West had come to the initial class with some ideas for the students: A talking oven. A smart grocery cart that would tell you where you are in a store. A way to know where her friends are sitting in a busy lunchroom.

Given the class’s constraints, those weren’t ideas they could bring to life. But the students listened to West’s experiences and came up with their own solutions to some of her day-to-day difficulties.

Noah Duchan and his group made Smart Shelf, a talking piece of furniture that can tell West what’s on it and where, and also describe the location of open areas. To build it, they linked a Raspberry Pi computer, an Amazon’s Echo smart speaker and an Amazon Alexa intelligent personal assistant.

Duchan demonstrated: “Alexa, ask Smart Shelf where the water bottle is.”

Alexa answered: “Your water bottle is on the right side of the top shelf.”

West was awestruck. “Oh my God!” she responded.

She tried it, asking what areas were open to set stuff down on. Alexa listed locations while Duchan looked on, smiling.

“It’s a really cool project,” Chesney said. “The students are taking this interesting off-the-shelf technology and combining it in ways the producers of the technology would never envision. That’s what we try to do here.”

Many of the teams will be working to give West access to the technologies they created next semester. Other projects include:

Steereo, a Google Map-based iOS navigation app that stores favorite routes, plays sound in the direction the user is supposed to travel, and adjusts distances to number of steps. The distance-to-steps conversion idea came from West, says team member Leda Daehler. “Many visually impaired people count steps to measure distance, so we used the iPhone’s internal pedometer to put all the directions in terms of the user’s personal step size,” Daehler said. “Estimated times are also in terms of the user’s pace.”

This blog post was excerpted from an article published on December 22, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s news office.

Filed under: Special Features

Tags: accessible coding, aming for the Greater Good initiative, assistive technologies, David Chesney, software engineering, University of Michigan engineering students design technology for visually impaired teen