Smart Hong Kong call sees phones become eyes for the blind
Born visually impaired, Edward Yip entered a new world with the iPhone, and now he’s sharing that joy with others via the latest technology
Smartphones have proved a marvellous convenience, with greatly enhanced information and social access. What the average user may not realise is that for the visually impaired, they can offer access to life.
Edward Yip Bing-chiu, 47, received his first iPhone in 2010. “It became my eyes,” says Yip, who has been blind since 1997.
The accessibility offered via built-in functions and downloaded apps meant he could listen to text, navigate streets and recognise objects through verbal descriptions.
“This opened up the world for me and I wondered what else could be done to make life more accessible to others like me?”
Yip was trained as a computer programmer despite being born blind in the left eye. In his late 20s, a disease slowly took his remaining vision. He made use of the time when he still had some of his sight to learn to feel his way around, listening to the sounds of the street in his neighbourhood, sensing how buses made turns just before the stop for home.
“The queue for public rehabilitation was two years’ long, so I just taught myself Braille from audiobooks in a library for the visually impaired.”
He practised reading with Braille Tang poetry, which everyone learns by heart as kids. “It was pretty fun, actually.”