There should be a background app for that, installed by default by all the OS vendors.
Back in the land-line days, I could have prevented a nasty burn on the side of my face if only I had a device that turned off the phone ringer when I was doing the ironing.
It may not be quite as foolproof, but I don’t get why phone users can’t use the acoustic signals for the blind.
Why can’t we just let Darwin take care of them?
because phone usage is often combined with earbuds? not only blind, but also deaf…
If this increases safety and prevents injuries and deaths, great, but speaking as someone who often uses his phone while walking around… how hard is it to maintain even the most basic awareness of your surroundings, enough to at least look up when you reach a street? I’m often distracted by my phone, but I can spare enough peripheral vision to avoid plowing into people and lamp posts, and to glance up for a couple seconds to make sure it’s safe to cross when I reach an intersection.
Ass backwards personified.
Heck, I burned both ears. Would you believe that damned phone rang again?
Edited to add a more serious note: don’t the walk signals also make a chirping noise? All walk signals I’m familiar with do so the visually impaired know when it’s safe to cross. That should be an indicator that’s at least as noticeable as lights in the pavement, if not more so.
On the other side of the coin, some corporate campuses are effectively banning the use of cell phones while walking; security guards at my dad’s place of employment can write up employees who look at a screen while walking around.
::shudder::
Sweet!
Too bad all us other dolts are fallible.
When I was a kid I often read books while walking around. Not on crowded sidewalks, and not inattentive to crosswalk lights or traffic, but one day I was startled out of my reading by a construction worker yelling “KID LOOK OUT FOR THAT HOLE!”
There was no hole. But I surely was cured of that habit.
Because it’s a horrible, scarring experience for the operator of a vehicle to strike and potentially kill a pedestrian, even if it is 100% the pedestrian’s fault. I was recently at the scene of a car-pedestrian collision where a drunk guy lurched out into traffic and was thrown about ten feet off the car’s hood. He was basically fine–in fact, the cops said it was the second time that week they had responded to him doing the same thing–but the woman who struck him was an absolute wreck, worried she had just killed a man, worried that she was going to go to jail or be torn apart by the corner boys who also watched the whole thing, worried that she was going to be deported. Through no fault of her own, she now has to live with that experience, which could have been so much worse. I’m all for influencing people’s behavior so that this sort of solution is less necessary, but preventing both a senseless death and the associated trauma (and let’s not forget the cascading effects to travel of a death on the tracks of public transport) seems worth some technological solutions right now.
Today I learn that the German word for “cool” is “cool.”
Cool.
Then there are the vigilantes like me, who won’t accommodate distracted cell walkers on the sidewalk. I’ll stop to keep from hitting them, but won’t deviate my path for them. I give teens a pass because they’re temporarily crazy, and can’t help it.
I met a woman who had hit and killed a man who wearing dark clothes and walking along the side of a road at night. I met her ten years after and she was still haunted by it. It shook me up thinking about it. Where I live, we have a lot of pedestrian traffic along roads without sidewalks; I’m forever having these “Surprise! There’s a person wearing all black walking RIGHT THERE!” moments and I am terrified I will hit someone one day.
based on a Milka commercial the song (I use this word loosely) it’s cool man was a Top10 hit in the German-speaking countries
(it’s 90s eurodancetrash. you’re warned)
One of the things I found interesting when I visited Finland in the '80s was that they’d take something like “optical lens specialist” and Finlandize it by making it one long word.
France on the other hand insists on making up new words of its own rather than adopting new words for new technology that the rest of the world has adopted.
