Have you ever watched in amazement as a visually impaired person nimbly maneuvers their way through a crowded subway station? Well, some thoughtful innovations are being developed to enable people with low vision to navigate the world with greater ease. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to the founder and CEO of Waymap, Tom Pey, about his start-up company’s breakthrough navigation technology. We discuss his company's product, look at some of the challenges that people with disabilities face, and touch upon the promise of autonomous vehicles for those without sight.

00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

00:22 Tom Pey - So what this does is this hands back, and that's why the phone itself becomes the instrument that is the accurate navigation device, because in your phone you now have the freedom to explore.

00:37 Narrator - Have you ever watched in amazement as a visually impaired person nimbly maneuvers their way through a crowded subway station? Well, some thoughtful innovations are being developed to enable people with low vision to navigate the world with greater ease. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to the founder and CEO of Waymap, Tom Pey, about his start-up company’s breakthrough navigation technology. We discuss his company's product, look at some of the challenges that people with disabilities face, and touch upon the promise of autonomous vehicles for those without sight.

01:33 Alex Wise - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Pey. He is the CEO. Of Waymap. Tom, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

01:41 Tom Pey - Thank you for having me.

01:43 Alex Wise - So why don't you tell us a little bit about the journey that you and your colleagues have had with Waymap, what the mission of the organization is and what problems you're trying to solve with it?

01:55 Tom Pey - Basically we started out trying to solve a very simple problem and that was the seven blind young people in London. Said the most important thing to them to help them to change their lives for the better was to be able to get around London Underground like everyone else, and the reason for that was that they were young. They, uh, a couple of them had just been out on a date with a with a boyfriend or girlfriend and they had been taken around by these adults, strangers, sighted guides to help them to navigate the underground and it wasn't very cool, so they thought, hey, you know, an app could stop, they could solve this for us. I had done some research on it previously, so I put my hand up and said look I'd solved that problem for you. You know, we applied to google.org and we got $1,000,000 grant and they told us to go out and change the world for blind people. And we carried out trials across the world with literally thousands of blind people asking them how we could solve their mobility problems. How could we help them to get around better, and as a result we wrote the world for standard for audio-based navigation for people who are blind or low vision that's currently an American standard as well. And we've also written standard for pig with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And from that we developed our app through Waymap and we're currently rolling it out in Washington DC.

03:30 Alex Wise - And so will it be a layer ultimately on Google Maps? Like, I'm thinking if I put in walking directions for me from point A to point B, how might it be different with the Waymap layer, let's say?

03:45 Tom Pey - The difference is that first of all, it would be more accurate than Google Maps because it doesn't rely solely on GPS. In fact, it doesn't rely on signals at all if they're not there. The second thing is that it works outdoors and indoors,