Employees of Samsung R&D Institute Poland (SRPOL) have organized workshops for the youth with visual impairments in the company’s headquarters in Warsaw. The meetings offered a unique opportunity to test out capabilities provided by solutions from the SmartThings and Bixby ecosystem offered by Samsung for this group of users. New technologies are continuously improving the quality of our everyday life. This is particularly important for the blind. It is the innovations in this area that guarantee them more safety and self-reliance.

It all started with Solve for Tomorrow

The workshops with this group of users with low vision and no vision were inspired by an error reported to SRPOL from the outside, using text to speech technology. Several employees recalled mentoring cooperation with the team representing the Technical High School for the Blind in Laski, which was one of the finalists in the last year’s edition of Solve for Tomorrow. Their project entitled “Apple tree podcasts” was awarded an honorable mention and a special “Positive Impact Award” from the jury.

Forty volunteers’ hearts

A group of 27 pupils together with their teachers enrolled in the workshops. The meeting was opened by Agata Różycka, the leader of the team working on natural language processing. She welcomed the amazing guests with the following words: “I would like to thank you for such an incredible initiative. Today, we can see the meaning of our work in a tangible manner, and together improve the quality of solutions that are just for you. I would like to thank everyone who got involved in the initiative; it is because of you that we are here together and can learn from one another.”

Marcin Kubsik, an NLP engineer, expert on cooperation between the voice assistant and IoT, introduced the participants to the world of SmartThings and Bixby in theoretical terms. The participants focused on pairing devices with the phones supporting ONE UI, version 6.0. Their smart and valuable comments were collected in order to use them in the future to improve the comfort of using their devices.

The workshop session was conducted in groups working alternately. Each group was accompanied by SRPOL volunteers. Nearly 40 employees were involved in supporting the participants, and many others also shared their knowledge and provided support in various detailed technical and organizational aspects.

Discovering user experience

During the workshops, the pupils could discover the latest technological developments by Samsung, from smartphones to devices, such as visual displays and digital appliances. Not only did they learn about the functions offered by the devices but they could also experience using them on their own.

“It was a very exciting task, as on a daily basis they are patient explorers of the world around them. For example, they know many more functions of their smartphone than average users. Purchasing a train ticket and choosing many options is not a problem for them. That is why the young people were very bold to use the devices by showing Samsung volunteers how they use sound functions,” says Hanna Stachera, a teacher from the Technical High School for the Blind in Laski.

The youth from Laski also learned how they can control other devices from their smartphones when they are outside their homes. By using voice commands, they can not only switch them off but also set options and change parameters. This form of testing gave the pupils a great deal of joy as this way they could feel like explorers discovering new functionalities. This, in turn, encouraged them to exchange their impressions and opinions with one another.

The pupils found out that modern devices are easy to use by visually impaired people. The workshops also proved that Samsung products give many more possibilities than they expected. Now they know that thanks to voice assistants and artificial intelligence, the world is becoming available to the blind and their everyday life is becoming more comfortable.

Samsung’s perspective

In order to understand the needs of the target group, SRPOL experts prepared scenarios that were followed to control interactions between the guests with the devices. They tried to emulate various possible use cases for Samsung products, for instance, by connecting to a Wi-Fi network.

“Our goal was to find strengths and weaknesses of our speech synthesis technology in terms of the needs of the blind and visually impaired people, using assistive technologies such as Voice Guide to operate Samsung devices,” says Marcin Lewandowski, head of a team that works with text to speech technology at SRPOL. “As engineers, we can let go of a great number of illusions about our solutions by simply observing users using the products that we are working on”.

The world with sounds at your fingertips

The workshops were a successful attempt to learn about the needs of visually impaired people. The participants could share their observations and suggestions. For people designing devices at Samsung, the pupils from Laski were experts since they showed them how they use various functionalities on a daily basis. The workshop facilitators were surprised by the participants’ immense knowledge about Samsung technologies. For instance, they discovered that visually impaired and blind people usually choose a considerably higher speed of synthetic speech than the one that could be comfortable for people who are not visually impaired and who are not used to using speech synthesizers.

Research workshops can be a motivating factor to take a look at designing new devices at a wider angle. It is also worth taking a look through the prism of people with disabilities and try to find out how the final product should work on the basis of feedback from users.