Don't buy just yet, unless you want to buy my used one. :) Zoom is coming out with the Zoom H5Studio, which is supposed to have the same preamps as the F3. It also has a set of built-in stereo mics. On the other hand, the F3 is definitely more rugged, and a fair bit smaller, so it depends on your use-case.
Great advice so far in this thread. I would just add that the must have apps are Be My Eyes, as already mentioned. This allows him to snap a photo and have it described by ChatGPT4-vision for free. He can also ask for more info etc. And if that doesn't work out, he can call a volunteer for free, 24-7.
Another good one is Seeing AI. This one is from Microsoft, and it has all sorts of useful utilities inside it, including a way to tell how bright a room is (helps to know if you left lights on or not), a barcode scanner that gives you product info (it beeps at you faster or slower to let you know you're getting warmer), a color analyzer that kinda' works sometimes, a document reader with voice guidance to help you get the camera lined up, a currency reader, and I think a few more goodies.
Many countries also have a library service for the blind. In the United States, it's called the National Library Service for the Blind. Definitely get him setup with them, or your other country's library service. The one in the U.S. let's you download an app and download tens-of-thousands of audiobooks for free. They also have a few magazines that they record each month. It's pretty amazing, and all available from his phone. The app is called Bard Mobile in the U.S.
I happen to be blind myself, so feel free to ask anything else you would like. I've been doing this for a while, and there are several more of us here as well.
According to the article, it's supported by every browser except Edge. It will be interesting to see who ultimately ends up making a better IE, Safari or Microsoft. So far, it seems Safari is winning, given the ever growing set of standards they don't support, but maybe this is Edge trying to catch up?
Update: Just tried this again, and it looks like they've loosened the restrictions. It will now describe people again. Yay! It just won't try to identify who someone is.
Original comment: Yeah, this wasn't always the case, until recently. People were using it to describe their kids, spouses, etc. Pissed a lot of folks off when they disabled it. I never even thought of using it for that, so now that I realize I could have, it kinda' pisses me off as well. Honestly, I never cared too much what they looked like, but it would have been interesting to hear the ChatGPT viewpoint. :)
But definitely not something I could have asked a fellow human about without it seeming really weird, and being confident I wouldn't get a biased answer. Though it's probably unrealistic to expect that the AI wouldn't also give a biased answer.
As A blind person, hopefully this never happens. But if it does, hopefully the person who decided to use the AI improperly. I know this might sound crazy, but maybe, just maybe, we should allow blind people themselves to take responsibility for the ways in which they use technology. Rather than locking up the dangerous AI that they might hurt themselves with, perhaps we might just allow blind people themselves to determine how much risk they are comfortable with taking.
Thanks for being a volunteer. For me as a blind person, there still is that sense that I'm bothering someone when I ask for human assistance. I realize that this is not really rational, given how much people seem to appreciate the opportunity to help, but it takes some effort to overcome this in my own brain regardless.
This is what I don't get. Not only have they not said otherwise, but they put it right up front in a pretty easy to understand brief message before you start using it. I guess lawyers just click agree without reading too.
Not OC, but I am also totally blind, so I'll bite. IMHO, just more silliness. The biggest problems that I as a blind person face don't generally stem from my blindness. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly inconvenient, and causes a whole host of problems. But the biggest, most life altering problems tend to stem from societies misconceptions. And the best weapon we have against misconceptions is communication. But all this fuss over words does not aid communication in any way. In fact, I think it does the exact opposite.
The only thing the language police have done for us is to make communication more awkward. How am I supposed to have a real conversation with anyone if they're constantly worried they're going to not use the right code words (which, by the way, change routinely). How is a blind person supposed to convince a potential employer that they can handle the work when they (according to the language police) can't even handle people using regular words. People learn by asking questions, and people aren't likely to ask questions if they are afraid of stepping on a verbal landmine and being labeled insensitive, or worse.
I don't know who the language police think they're serving by all this outrage and/or false concern, but it certainly isn't me. If I need to, I can get offended on my own behalf just fine thanks.
This guy was a legend. He wrote a program to translate print to braille and back again, as is noted in the linked article. He wasn't the first person to write such software, not even the first person to open source his copy, but he did write the library that is pretty much the go to version if you are serious about wanting to integrate braille into your software.