Aira–Helping the Vision Impaired to See

For people who are blind or have low vision, navigating life on a university campus can be quite challenging. Throw in a global pandemic with its social distancing and other regulations, and the task becomes even harder. Enter Aira: a “visual interpreting” app and service introduced to UMass Boston in 2021. With Aira, a professional agent looks through a user’s smartphone camera at their surroundings and helps to guide them through the area.

“It really is like having a friend in your pocket who can help you in different situations,” explained Michael Lyons, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Client Services. Aira can help students, faculty, and staff in social distancing, reading COVID- 19-related signage (which are often not written in braille), ordering food, navigating new pathways on campus, avoiding construction areas, managing online materials, and more.

UMass Boston staff have worked to customize Aira to fit the needs of the campus community. The “geofence” boundaries in which the app works extend not only around campus, but also to the surrounding areas. The geofence covers the main campus buildings, parking lots, walking paths, the Bayside building, the Residence Halls, the HarborWalk Path, athletic fields, the Peninsula and Harbor Point apartments, the JFK/UMass T station, the JFK Presidential Library, the EMK Institute, and more. And that’s just the geofence surrounding UMass Boston’s campus. The service has been extended to the university’s partner schools and covers all the Mass Bay Community College and Cape Cod Community College locations, as well as the Nantucket site for UMass Boston.

“Ray Lefebvre, our CIO, has really taken an interest in accessibility and promoting accessibility-related services and enhancements on our campus, and we’ve gotten a huge amount of support on this service and other related projects.”

Matt McCubbin, IT Accessibility Coordinator,

Matt McCubbin, IT Accessibility Coordinator, partnered with Lyons to take the lead on implementing this service. McCubbin mentioned the support of Joyce Morgan, the Director of the Ross Center for Disability Services, Lori Sullivan, a Compensation and Benefits Analyst for the Human Resources Department, and Jennifer Bose from the Institute for Community Inclusion, as essential in putting this service into place. McCubbin also discussed how expanding accessibility is one of IT’s core goals.

“Ray Lefebvre, our CIO, has really taken an interest in accessibility and promoting accessibility-related services and enhancements on our campus, and we’ve gotten a huge amount of support on this service and other related projects,” said McCubbin.