My name is Alan Windley,
and I'm a retired,
vision impaired person.
I have a guide dog that I use.
I haven't worked for nine years in a paid capacity.
I find in the years that I've lived,
I've found that there have been some 
really big steps in technology that have made life a lot 
easier
for me as a vision impaired person,
and one of those big steps is the advent of the smartphone 
in particular,
where I have apps that can make life a lot more 
interesting and a lot easier for me.
For example,
I have Soundscape,
which now it's been out for a couple of years and 
Soundscape makes it easier for me to get around.
So if I'm walking around somewhere with my guide dog,
I can have a Bluetooth headset on with 
aftershocks technology and so that I can 
hear what's around me as well as what's coming through
my ears and Soundscape tells me where I am,
and I can set destinations,
and I can also make it so that 
it sends out an alarm when it comes to the position that I'm in.
But mostly I just use it so that I could walk around.
And as I'm walking,
it tells me the names of the streets.
It's in stereo,
so if there's a cafe on the left,
it's louder in the left ear or on the right,
it louder in the right ear.
And if I get to an intersection it tells me which way the streets run and I 
found that really good.
There's another app that I use calls Seeing AI and these two 
app that are free to download thanks to Microsoft 
and Seeing AI enables me
to read.
If I just aim my phone,
at where I want and it will start reading. 
It will turn the text into a file,
and I can save that file.
It can identify money for me.
It,
 it will also read most barcodes 
and things like that,
so that makes it a lot easier for me
to cope in the world, when I'm by myself - makes it so much easier.
To go into things that
are not so good...
Years ago,
one of the things I used to enjoy when I was travelling was I could 
see enough to see
the station,
the station signs as you went past them in the train and 
they were huge,
huge white signs with very large black writing on them.
And I'm talking about lettering that's sort of half a metre high or more 
and when they took those away had made it very,
very difficult for me as a vision impaired person to actually know where I was
I know at the moment we now have people announcing 
over the loudspeakers in the train where you are,
what platform,
that sort of thing that you're coming up to.
But that that has made it a bit easier.
But when they took those signs away,
as much as I whinged and complained,
nothing was ever done about it because it was now in our sort of yellow writing on 
orange background or white writing on an orange background,
which is very difficult for a vision impaired person to actually see.
or from my vision anyway.
I'm trying to think of anything further that just comes to 
mind.
Councils changing things to suit one disability and making it 
hard for another disability.
For example,
sometimes what is good for a wheelchair person is 
not also good for a blind or vision impaired person.
For example,
the dots...
the dots that you can feel under your feet but also with your cane on 
the platforms and on the ramps going up and down in the 
streets are very good for blind people, then it's harder 
for people in wheelchairs to push themselves over these bumps.
So there's those sorts of things that conflict between the blind and 
the wheelchair people.