LOUISVILLE, KY / AGILITYPR.NEWS / February 17, 2021 / Sara Brown

Sbrown@aph.org

(c) 502-608-3271

Hello,

Amazing advances in technology provide revolutionary and intuitive ways to provide services to individuals with visual impairments. One activity that can be particularly challenging is navigating an indoor building such as an airport, arena or mall. GoodMaps’, which was born out of the American Printing House for the Blind (APH), mission is to further the cause of accessible navigation. Founded in 2019, GoodMaps identified universal accessible navigation was limited or nonexistent by the lack of indoor digital mapping, hence, they set out to map the great indoors. 

Their first released app, GoodMaps Explore, uses audio instructions to communicate routing and critical spatial information as users move through a space, whether indoors or outdoors, drawing upon GoodMaps’ state-of-the-art digital maps. This allows venues to create an accessible, safe and productive indoor spaces by creating and maintaining accurate and secure 2D and 3D digital maps. The app provides accurate positioning and delivers a trusted wayfinding experience.

If you are interested in doing a news story on GoodMaps to highlight its numerous services and benefits, I can arrange for interviews with a representative and a person who uses the services.

I have attached a press release with further details. Thank you for your consideration and please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Sara

For Immediate Release

GoodMaps Continues to Provide Enhanced Wayfinding by Bringing Digital Maps to Life

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (February 17, 2021) – GoodMaps, born out of American Printing House for the Blind (APH), is creating innovative wayfinding experiences for the visually impaired. Its first contribution, GoodMaps Studio, is a groundbreaking mapping platform that provides digital maps of buildings for its users.

These state-of-the-art digital maps are then made available in the GoodMaps Explore app, which provides audio instructions to communicate routing and critical spatial information as users move through a space, whether indoors or outdoors. The app can be downloaded for free in the Apple App Store or Android Marketplace.

Fresh off being named Best of CES^® 2021 Finalist and CES^® 2021 Innovation Awards Honoree, GoodMaps has set out to establish partnerships that will enable them to extend their reach and map as many buildings as possible. The GoodMaps Explore app is unique in that its camera-based positioning technology provides accurate locations within a few feet of your destination. Other companies have an accuracy rate that varies between 12 feet to more than 30 feet. For people who are blind or a first responder, this drastic difference in accuracy makes digital maps usable and most importantly, necessary.

GoodMaps requires no infrastructure or beacons in a building. Others install dozens of beacons, which are costly and require maintenance. By utilizing LiDAR and image recognition, GoodMaps provide fast and accurate maps of indoor spaces at a fraction of the effort and costs.

About American Printing House for the Blind’s GoodMaps Explore

GoodMaps Explore is an accessible navigation application. It helps everyone, visually impaired or not, navigate indoors and outdoors safely and efficiently. To make that happen, GoodMaps is on a mission to map the great indoors by streamlining that process. We can accurately map a building in the time it takes to walk through it. All of these maps are available to Explore app users. Another revolutionary aspect of GoodMaps Explore is the superior positioning accuracy provided by camera-based positioning (CPS). CPS is not limited to indoor positioning and has the potential to bring this accuracy level outdoors. For more information, please go to www.GoodMaps.com.

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