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Comment by bnjemian | Hacker News Reader

I once read that some people who are blind from an early age, as they get older, start to click their tongue, but often those around them (parents, siblings, etc.) will discourage them. Thing is, that clicking can actually be used to develop a type of vision that operates similarly to echo location in cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.) – it comes about because the child realizes that if they make a sharp sound, they can begin to orient themselves with the reflections of the sound waves. After all, vision is in the brain; the eyes are just the sensors. Point being, if your son starts making clicking sounds with his tongue, you likely won't want to discourage that. And on the flip, teaching him to click may provide a means of developing his vision in an alternative way.

Edit: Here's a Pubmed article on a study where blind and sighted people were trained to echolocate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8171922/

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Learning to understand the world around you via clicking isn't a natural or easy thing to do. I can't do it personally but have looked into it. For me the benefits didn't seem worth the time investment (plus I was older when I looked into it.)

Learning to click to understand what is around you is, IMO, a viable thing to look into for your kid and decide if you want to undertake that training. Daniel Kish is the name of the guy most famous for it and would be a decent place to start looking.

An amusing anecdote and a bit of blind throwing shade a blind: https://youtu.be/u-7w3m7fhl4?t=326

Fellow blind person here, adding my own anecdote. I click and echolocate. I have two different kinds of clicks. A soft click for very immediate surrounding which I can do rapidly if I need to, and a loud click for figuring out large spaces which I don't use very often for relatively obvious reasons. They're quite helpful for me and especially in new unfamiliar spaces it's almost a reflex that happens on its own unless I consciously try to stop it for social reasons. Just to add another datapoint. What works for one might not work for another, so there's a lot of trial and error involved in figuring out what works and what doesn't. This can be very frustrating sometimes but sympathy will go a long way.

Something I wanted to add, maybe this thread in particular isn't the best place for this but in general, I'm very lucky that my parents did not prevent me from doing things that others may have. For example, I climbed trees, rode a bike, and generally tried to do all of the things my sighted peers were doing. Naturally there were accidents, but not preventing me from doing those things, not preventing me from learning my limits, learning my balance and physical control, getting hurt and getting back up, I believe were absolutely vital to making me the person I am today. I imagine as a parent this can be very stressful or worrying, but I honestly do not believe I would be as independent now if I wasn't allowed to do those things back then. So unless it is absolutely certain that this is something that they will not be able to do at all, maybe consider letting them try it. It will absolutely help confidence, self worth and skills for later independence that are very, very, very badly needed and very easily missed. I'm not a parent however, so of course take this with a grain of salt. My experience may be slightly biased here.

Very interesting. I'll keep that in mind going forward. Seems like it could be a valuable skill!

> rode a bike

Wow, any chance you feel like explaining how you did it? Do you a small amount of vision or are you completely blind?

I guess you can ride a bike blindly on a large empty lot with some assistance from friends to keep you within.

What age did you start learning to echolocate and how long did it take?

I alluded to it in my other post, but I fully agree with your sentiment around independence and figuring out your own boundaries. Even if I'm all but guaranteed a bit of pain along the way.

Your lucky! I never got to climb trees until I was in my late 20s because apparently it was something, for some reason, I just couldn't do. Skydiving though was cool! I'm not kidding.

Blind people could benefit of carrying one or several ultrasonic sensor like those used on cars to park. That would emit soft bleeps, faster when something is on the way or closer to an obstacle.

Can be built easily with an Arduino

I think that another possibility could be to fill your home or workplace with those devices put on walls or furniture. The idea would be that your table could say to you "lookout, I'm here" when you are about to crash against it. Use it first in the areas that were more problematic. The volume of the bleeps should be reduced to a low comfortable whispering level so they don't annoy the user. I wonder why nobody has created still a kitt providing a soundscape for blind people. That product should have a different click sound for each object marked in the soundscape.

Another possibility would be a snapshot soundscape, where a remote control could turn on/off the system only when necessary providing the blind people with a mental picture hearing all the blips at the same time and its position respect to the other blips. Like a cane, but covering much more distance

Hum, that last idea deserve more time

I want to propose this system. Imagine that you are on a workplace where blind people came often to work or as clients. There is a soft, low, slow and sparse music that is pleasing to hear as a background for anybody and is always changing.

Now lets imagine that this music is codified and played on a 3D system.

Every time we hear a piano note it means "door here", all bass notes mean "danger/stairs" and a flute means for example "WC". That would be awesome for blind people navigating new places without interrupting other workers asking for directions. Each one of this signals would be played on intervals of one minute or more, never less, so most of the time you have either silence or pleasant sounds that don't bother other people and the notes played by a particular instrument are changed each time for the same reason.

If we need more information, we could add short cords from popular music to convey additional words. For example a <garage door> could play on piano the four note sequence "here on my car" from Gary Numan, or iterate over a list of similar parts of very popular songs with the word "car" on it to not be too repetitive.

Of course it just could also just say "garage door" when a modified white cane approach like on elevators, but that could be distracting for non blind workers.

Muzak but specifically for blind people!

Such an engineer's solution. :P

The glaring issue here would be standardization. Either every place uses the same sounds, or you have to learn a new system for each place you visit using this sort of thing. This is also why you couldn't change notes regularly, which would be boring and repetitive for everyone else.

The same instruments should be used for the same things everywhere. Yep. This is the idea.

Or at least to navigate a complex multistore building with a lot of repeated elements. I wonder if a videogame could be designed as a soundgame for blind people replacing images by sounds.

I'd be curious to hear why you and GP think technical solutions like this don't currently exist. Nobody thought of it? Cost? Effectiveness?

Instead of the sound clues triggering every minute, it may trigger on arrival of the person wearing RF ID or phone.

Unless there is a lot of blind workers in the room, much better, yep.

Blind people at least should have a way to be able to evacuate a building with sound clues instead the traditional lights that turn up if there is a fire and are useless for them. The emergency lights are mandatory by law, but including emergency blips could be also useful for everybody in some areas where a lot of blind people are expected (or live).

Blind people should be given the opportunity to evacuate a building or a school just by their own means, even if is alone or left behind in a emergency. You can't always rely on touching to orientate yourself if there is a fire. Specially metallic things.

Where do you live that the fire alarm doesn’t have any sound?

Could you find the exit currently following that sound?

Can those alarms redirect you on real time to a secondary route to escape if the main is burning or blocked?

Oh I see what you are saying. My bad

Systems like that have existed for decades in various versions. The only blind people who use them are people who went blind as an adult - and then often only the investor. People who went blind young have learned to deal with the world and discover technology like that is more annoying than helpful.

Dogs and canes work very well and solve most of the problem. It doesn't really matter if they are walking into a wall, piano or door - they need to know to avoid it. If you want useful sounds require every traffic light to have beeps when it is safe to cross loud enough to be heard across the street - because that is a real problem blind people have in navigating. Most of the rest of the world is forgiving to the types of mistakes blind people make and so they don't really need help.

The other way you can help the blind is just be willing to give directions from the sidewalk in front of a building to the front door.

These products exists since the 80s. I have never seen one that is actually practical in real life. The elevator-pitch always sounds nice, to sighted people at least..

Please don't fall for this patronising attitude that just because you are a tech person, you can invent all sorts of helpful gadgets.

Educate yourself about the disability before giving advice or your great $0.02 ideas. They are always ment in a good way, but tiring for those who are in the know.

Blind people don't have a big problem with bumping into furniture in their own home, much the same way you don't wipe out when walking from your bed to the bathroom in the dark. And instead of you getting 30 seconds of practice every other night, they navigate that way all the time.

Also, a bunch of noise playing whenever you walk through your house sounds like a huge bother.

Is the refrigerator door open or closed? What about the drawers? Is the vacuum in the middle of the path?

Blind people don't need to know this things, of course. Don't need anybody, and can navigate everything like champs. On the other way, would really do harm to be able to know this on advance?.

The reason this isn't a product that people use is because it sucks. Not because you were the first guy to think about the poor blind people.

Can confirm, I do this all the time lol. The crashing into furneture thing hah. I think it's too much fun! Also, I wouldn't want too much sound around me. I'm already aversive to overly loud, overly changing sounds. They tend to set off my migraines.

Yeah! Some reference info about this amazing approach:

Human click-based echolocation: Effects of blindness and age, and real-life implications in a 10-week training program https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8171922/

Human echolocation lets blind man 'see' (CNN video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHYCs8xtzUI

Human echolocation - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

Hah! Looks like we found the same article. Interesting other links too!

This episode of the podcast Invisibilia covers a man who teaches blind children the skill of echolocation: https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

INdeed, I remember seeing a video of a guy that did exactly this. Impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtVOK04XvA

Well I didn't do this automatically, that's for sure. It was something my mother saw on TV and said you should start doing that, I was like uh no that's weird.

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