Transcript from GPS Interview with Rich Irwin, BrailleNote GPS User

Pat Hodgins: We’re here with Rich Irwin, he’s a BrailleNote GPS user who has quite an interesting GPS story to share with us today.  Thank you very much for joining us, Rich.

Rich Irwin: Oh, you’re welcome, thank you for inviting me.

PH: It’s our pleasure entirely.  So, I read that you had posted on Mike May’s website with Tendero Group that you took quite an interesting bus ride with your BrailleNote GPS.  Would you like to tell us a little bit about it? 

RI: Sure, I’d be glad to.  Basically, I had to take a trip of about 50 miles which involved first of all taking a cab from my house to the nearest bus stop, which was about 3½  miles away, then taking a bus system from there into San Francisco to catch a BART system, and then from BART going out to the city of Pittsburgh, which is the end of the line for the system, and from there taking a, I guess, a small transit bus called the Delta Transit out to a city called Oakley, which is kind of out in the Delta country about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.

PH: That’s quite a trip.

RI: Yeah.  And I didn’t know how far exactly it was from the BART station to Oakley.  I’d never heard of the transit system, and I’d never actually been out to Oakley myself, so it was all new to me.  When I got off at the BART station, my first challenge was to find this bus stop using the traditional system of asking somebody.  I found somebody that was actually in a wheelchair, actually one of the scooters, and he said, “Well, just come with me, I’m going to take the same bus,” so that worked out quite well.  When we got on the bus we found out almost immediately from the bus driver that this was his first trip ever on this route.

PH: Oh wow, so you guys were both on your first trip out there, huh?

RI: Yeah.  And the bus is I guess what you’d call a local, it goes all over the country out there.  It doesn’t go in a straight line getting you from one place to another, so to speak.  And we’d gone  about a half hour and we were apparently somewhere in the city of Antioch, and the bus driver left the stop and proceeded to go straight ahead, and everybody yelled at him, “You’re going the wrong way, you’re going the wrong way.”  And he apparently was having to continue on that way for awhile.  There was a freeway out there and so he had to go across the freeway, and with freeways you’ve got onramps, offramps and only one direction you can go for awhile, that sort of thing. And he went for maybe five minutes before he actually stopped, and then he said, “Ok, how do I get back to where I’m supposed to go, or how do I get back on the route if you guys know I’m off of it, because obviously I am off, but I don’t know how to get back.”  And everyone said, “Well, we really don’t know.  We just know that you went the wrong way; we always take the bus and we know its not where it usually is.”

PH: So enter BrailleNote GPS, huh?

RI: At that point I said, yeah, “I’ve got my GPS fired up, I’ve been monitoring where we’re at.  Can you tell me the names of an intersection or something like that where we need to be, and I’ll see if I can get it to direct us back through setting up a vehicle route.”  And he gave me the intersection where he’d made the wrong turn, or not made the turn actually, I guess he was supposed to make a right turn, and he went straight ahead.  And so I set that into the GPS and mapped the route for a vehicle route, which as I say, because of freeways and so on, we had to go, we must have gone somewhere in the range of three to five miles to get back to where we were supposed to be because of these freeways, one-way roads, and out in the country—a combination.  So I could understand why the other passengers didn’t know the exact way to get back.  But, he just listened to the GPS.  I was sitting right behind him, and I had the volume up so he could hear it, and he just listened to the GPS to tell him where to turn and so on, and pretty soon we were back where he had made the wrong turn, and we were back on the route.  Only about a half hour late on his route, but other than that, we got back where we needed to go.

PH: Well that’s great.  It could’ve been a lot more than a half hour if you hadn’t been there with the GPS, huh?

RI: Right.  And, uh, almost immediately when we got back everybody…well, they were kind of questioning whether this was going to work or not, you know, and when we got back—there were about, I would say maybe fifteen people on the bus—and they all kind of applauded, and said “Gee, that’s great,” you know.  And one person at least said, “Gee, the blind guy can navigate better than we can.”  And that’s what I wrote about, I just thought it was kind of a cute reaction.

PH: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.  And how long have you been a GPS user, Rich?

RI: I’ve been a GPS user, let’s see, I got my BrailleNote in January of 2004, and I got the GPS in June of 2004, so about, I guess, about a year now.  It seems a lot longer than that, but it’s been a fantastic thing, I’ve found some really unique uses for it.  One of the reasons I was going out to Oakley, actually, I was going to meet a real estate agent out there who was going to take me over to another town where I was going to look at a housing development out there, a senior retirement community, and that was where I was going to meet the agent, was in Oakley.  I’ve actually bought a new home which I’ll be moving to in a couple weeks, up in the Santa Rosa area, in a place called Oakmont.  And I’ve used the GPS when listings came up for various places, I’ve actually programmed the address of the home in, and then did a virtual look-around to see where it was at relative to various things before I talked to the agent, and either said, “Yeah, lets look at it,” or “No, let’s not.”  And then a couple times I’ve actually been able to use it to help the agent find the house.  So it’s been a very valuable tool for that too.

PH: So you’re almost shopping the neighborhood with your GPS before you even bother looking at a home.

RI: Exactly.

PH: That’s amazing.

RI: And of course a couple things…I mean, it’ll give you some of the information like, is there a shopping center nearby and stuff like that, but one of the things I found after I did locate the house I’m going to buy, is that there was a bus stop about 300 feet away, so that’s going to be great for me. One of my first projects when I get moved up there will be marking the point for the various bus stops in the area so I know where they’re at.

PH: Yeah, absolutely.  Well, can you talk about that a little bit?  When you have a route that you travel on public transportation frequently, how easy is it to program in something that you do and save it as a favorite?

RI: Oh, it’s really very easy.  Basically what you do, and especially if you’re traveling by yourself, you’re in a position, you’ve got to get GPS signal and you just hit the appropriate command to define the p.o.y at the position where you want to be, p.o.y. being point of interest, for somebody that’s listening or reading who is not aware of that.  And it asks you what you want to name it, and you give it a name.  Usually at the point when I mark it I just give it a brief name so I know what it is, and then later, maybe at home or some other time, I’ll go back and edit it and put in if there is an address or phone number or some sort of additional information that I wouldn’t have time to put in there at that time, and then the positions are then, you know I keep them for myself.  But then also, you know, like a bus stop or maybe a hospital or nice restaurant, whatever, we actually all send those to Mike May at Tendero once a month, and then he collects those all together and then once a month puts them on his website so that we can all, everybody all over the world can share them.  It really adds to our database quite tremendously, and it’s really been very helpful for a lot of us.

PH: Yeah.  So, I mean, you are continuously compiling new points of interest so if you wanted to go to, Florida say, you could look on the web and see what people who have been traveling around Florida with GPS have found that’s interesting and posted there for you.

RI: Right, exactly.  And in fact, I had an incident a while back, a friend of mine who has a GPS went to Florida for Christmas to visit a friend, and they were still learning how to use it, and they called me and said, “I’m having trouble finding such and such down here.”  And I went in, I put the Florida map in and went in and did a virtual search for what they were looking for.  And then I actually was able to put together a pedestrian route for them, and then I took that and emailed it to them, and they put that in their own GPS BrailleNote to use while they were down there.

PH: Wow, so you used the BrailleNote, then, to look up all the information and create the virtual route with the GPS, and then emailed that through the BrailleNote email system, and then they were able to get at it.

RI: Right, right, so it’s a fantastically versatile system.  It opens so many doors for us that wouldn’t be available, or haven’t been available in the past.  And probably some of the listeners that are familiar with that, there were several of us that went over with Mike May last year to Ireland and Scotland, and I don’t think any of us had ever been to Dublin or Cork or Edinborough or Glasgow.  And we were navigating all over the place, in fact we were at times working with visually impaired persons over there, showing them how the systems work and how they could find certain places over there themselves, and here we were the tourists.  It’s just great to have that capability.

PH: Well thank you so much for sharing with us today, Rich, I really appreciate it, and I think that a lot of people will gain a lot of valuable insight from your stories, so thanks again, I really appreciate that.

RI: Thank you