Mike May was a blind Californian who, in 2000, became a sighted Californian. A rare and risky stem cell transplant surgery restored sight to a man who had been totally blind for 43 years. The operation made for exceedingly interesting media coverage and a biography/memoir highlighting his accomplishments with and without sight. For blind and low-vision users of technology, his name is forever linked with GPS technology, accessible maps, and wayfinding.
Background
Mike May became totally blind in a backyard accident when he was three years old. If acquiring a disability enhances the qualities already intrinsic in any given personality, then the three-year-old Mike May must have been exceedingly smart, charismatic, and an inquisitive seeker of adventure. Those are the traits, in other words, that define the adult he became.
After some work with the CIA and gaining recognition as a world class blind downhill skier, May positioned himself in the heart of technological developments benefiting people who are visually impaired. His passion for exploration and mapping meant that the power unleashed by global positioning software and the unexpected bonus it would be for blind people was a natural connection for Mike May to make.
In the mid-1990s, Mike May garnered media attention within the disability community and mainstream media with a GPS configuration using a standard laptop and screen reading software. Developed by May and Charles LaPierre, the product was called Strider. It was eventually abandoned in the pursuit of more sophisticated applications. Atlas Speaks and GPS-Talk enjoyed some popularity when released in 1995 and 2000, but their use declined as the computing world made the transition from DOS to Windows-based platforms. When HumanWare released a PDA notetaker called the BrailleNote, Mike May's company, Sendero Group LLC, was about to take a giant leap forward. In 2002, Sendero Group LLC and HumanWare launched the first GPS software designed to run on portable devices with braille and speech output. With Sendero GPS running on a BrailleNote or VoiceNote unit, someone who is visually impaired or blind could map out turn-by-turn routes to destinations, check current location whether on foot or in a vehicle, "look around" to see where the nearest points of interest might be, and perform countless other tasks related to wayfinding that simply had not previously been possible. The effect in 2002 was something akin to magic.
Milestones
In the last decade, Sendero has gained widespread popularity among people who are blind and low vision, with versions of its GPS software running on a variety of portable devices employing braille and/or speech output. We have all seen technology changing rapidly in the last decade, and as a user of access technology himself, Mike May and Sendero Group have kept pace with those changes.
While Sendero GPS software continues to be effective on such note taking devices as the HumanWare BrailleNote family of products and HIMS Inc. Braille Sense family of products, not every blind person uses one of these devices. In 2010, Sendero released the Lookaround app for iPhone users. While not a turn-by-turn application, Lookaround lives up to its name. Shake your phone and Lookaround will tell you the address of your current location, nearby points of interest, and nearest intersection. Using it in a taxi, for example, Lookaround can at least inform the blind passenger of the general route being taken.
Also in 2010, a product called PC Maps became available. Sitting at your desktop or laptop keyboard, you can plan virtual routes or just "walk around" a familiar or unfamiliar neighborhood. Earlier this year, an add-on to PC Maps called Sendero PC GPS enhanced that virtual product by adding GPS capabilities. You can, in other words, map a route to your destination and then, if your laptop is equipped with GPS receiving capabilities, take your netbook or laptop along for the walk or ride to give you turn-by-turn instructions.
For this article, I used Sendero PC Maps to look around my own neighborhood and several others, both familiar and unfamiliar. I created routes, some designed for walking and others for driving, for trips spanning from .5to 1,000 miles. By using simple keystrokes (the letter "I" for going forward, "J" for turning left, and "L" for turning right) you can explore the streets outside your door or a thousand miles away. The PC Maps programs include not only a vast database of commercial points of interest (restaurants, hotels, banks, and dentist offices, for instance), but also enable users to add their own points of interest. In other words, if there is a really fascinating statue of Tecumseh in front of a particular office building, you can add that statue as a user point of interest, share it, and thus enable other blind travelers to find and appreciate it, too.
The Sendero PC Maps package includes a "copy to clipboard" feature that makes a simple business of extracting a route or list of points of interests or other discovered data from the program and pasting it into a Word document or e-mail message. In this way, for instance, you can save and print out a route to give to a friend or e-mail yourself a list of Vietnamese restaurants in a city you are planning to visit. You can create a Favorites list of locations and examine your own exploration history.
Mystic Access
Many of the Sendero products have been made easier to learn and use with the help of tutorials created by Chris Grabowski of Mystic Access. A former technical support specialist for Sendero Group, Grabowski formed his own company in April 2013. Besides training and information, his company, Mystic Access, provides excellent and affordable tutorials on many of the Sendero products.
For this article, I used a Mystic Access tutorial to guide me through the learning process. It was clear, concise, broken into small and manageable MP3 files, and rendered the learning curve a pleasant and relatively painless experience.
What's Next
When I interviewed Mike May in late spring, his hope was that the latest Sendero solution, called the Seeing Eye app, would be ready for release in July at the National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the Blind conventions. It was indeed ready. Designed to be a complete turn-by-turn GPS application for iOS devices, completely compatible with VoiceOver, the Seeing Eye app, named so because it was developed in partnership with the Morristown, NJ, guide dog training facility, has already gained wide popularity. It will be reviewed in a separate AccessWorld article.
Although Mike May enjoys the convenience of partial sight, he considers it a kind of pleasure-laden add-on. He still uses a braille notetaker, still uses a Seeing Eye dog, and is still exploring the world, both metaphorically and literally, for new possibilities. At 59, he says his current aspiration is to spend half his time on Sendero and the other half on projects as yet unnamed. It is highly likely that those new projects will be ones the rest of us will want to follow as well.
For More Information
For GPS product information and pricing, visit Sendero or call 888-757-6810.
For information on tutorials and training, visit Mystic Access. The book chronicling some of Mike May's adventures while both blind and sighted, Crashing Through, by Robert Kurson, is available in hardcover and paperback from Amazon. Accessible versions are available in braille and talking book format from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, as well as from Bookshare, and Audible.
