In spring of my eighth grade year, my parents and I visited my aunt, Sister. Olivia. She had a radio with 9 bands on it, more than I’d ever seen before and it totally captivated me. I got to play with it and discovered the weather Channel, didn’t know that existed. That a radio station broadcasted the weather 24/7 was very interesting to me. Later that year, when Sister visited us, she gave me the radio to keep. Besides the weather channel, it picked up a lot of shortwave stations, and also VHF and UHF frequencies including ham radio repeaters; I happily used that radio for more than thirty years.
Two years later we had mini topics in second semester of science in my tenth grade year. Many of the courses were biology related, which didn’t do much for me as a blind kid, but there was one on meteorology, possibly my favorite 6 weeks of science class in high school. The teacher had taught a blind student before, so he knew exactly what to do. He got assignments to the braillist (MaryAnn Damm) early enough, and explained visual things in class. That was the first time I learned the basics of the science behind meteorology, it was a lot of fun. The next year, when I got an Apple IIe I still had the relative humidity chart from the class to look up dew points, and wrote a program to do it in Apple basic; very cool at the time. Around the same time my older sister Janean got me the formula to calculate wind chill, another cool program was the result.
I am not the only blind person to want to be a meteorologist, there have been quite a few. Still, thirty years later, it’s still not possible. I think the time is coming though, maybe less than ten years from now. Analyzing satellite imagery and weather maps, as well as looking at visual models are the problems, though with new technologies being developed, the dream is much closer than before.
Last year, I was wondering if I could write an app that would pull weather data and then build a text representation of temperature or precipitation maps The problem is, it would have to use many API calls to just get a momentary glimpse of what was happening in an area It would have become very expensive, very quickly; I kind of gave up.
In March of this year, 2023, Apple added a new feature to VoiceOver in one of their miner iOS updates. They made it possible for a blind person to look at maps in the official Apple weather app on iPhone and iPads. The blind person could slide their finger around the map and VoiceOver would tell them what the temperature was in the location where their finger was. VoiceOver would also make a tone to indicate how hot or cold the temperature was, or how intense the precipitation was at the location of the person’s finger. This still is very cool, and can help understand the shapes of weather fronts, even more than an AI description. I found an iPhone was a bit small to really use this feature, so it pushed me over the edge to replace my old very sluggish iPad fifth generation; I was already considering that anyway.
AI and Chat GPT have been in everyone’s minds since last November, and blind people haven’t been left out in the least, in fact, Open AI products have combined with Be My Eyes to provide an AI environment to describe images to those who can’t see them. While I was waiting to be accepted into the beta program to test what is now called Be My AI, Thomas Domville recorded a podcast for AppleVis where among other things, he demonstrated that the AI could describe weather maps, and answer questions about it. That got me super excited, and I couldn’t wait, but alas, I still had to. About a month after that podcast, I was accepted, and among other cool things, weather maps and satellite images have been some of the things the beta of Be My AI have helped me understand.
When Carrot Weather told me it was raining, Be My AI helped me understand that although there was rain all around my location, it didn’t seem to be raining at the time right where I was. I then went out for a walk and stayed totally dry. I have also gotten descriptions of satellite imagery though not quite sure how to analyze that yet. The key will be to write specific prompts to get more in depth information from future maps and images, which I think will be very doable.
A bummer is that when I ask the AI how far away the storm is, it doesn’t know, but I think there’s a solution for that. I think if I write a prompt that says city A and city B are x miles apart then maybe it might be able to tell me. I was hoping to test that while writing this post, but there isn’t any precipitation with in hundreds of miles of here. No rain predicted until the middle of next week.
Using weather map descriptions, along with Apple weather maps and VoiceOver, are two amazing tools we as blind people didn’t have even six months ago. Together, they can give me much more information than I ever had before, that app I wanted to write last year is no longer needed. A blind meteorologist isn’t quite yet possible, but as I said earlier, I don’t think it’s very far off anymore. Even though it won’t happen for me, I’m still excited that it will be possible for blind dreamers in the future, and I’m still young enough to enjoy it as an enthusiast, and am allowed to understand data more than I could just last year, though not quite as well as those who are sighted. We are definitely living in very interesting (in a good way) times.
Accessibility Insights 