I have been thinking about how Google Maps can be more useful to the deaf. The idea would be similar to the idea in the recent blog post https://www.blog.google/products/maps/building-map-everyone/. In order to make maps useful for the deaf/hard-of-hearing, a user would take a sound sample in a location. This data could then build a sound picture for the location, and other users could search for quiet places at that time of day. Would anyone be interested in working on this with me?
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Wow that would be a great idea @angoodkind i would tag the Main moderators to get your post noticed 
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Thanks! How do I do that?
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Yes it is very useful to deaf
@DiAnaUS wrote:
Wow that would be a great idea @angoodkind i would tag the Main moderators to get your post noticed
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Hi @DiAnaUS there is no need to tag the Googlers. They will see the post.
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Hi @angoodkind can you explain more about your idea? I’m confused how having a sound sample of a location can help deaf people - they can’t hear the samples! It might be useful for low/no sight people as they tend to rely more on sound and touch than anything else.
My brother and his wife are both deaf so I’m quite familiar with their needs.
Regards Paul
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I guess I primarily had in mind people who were hard-of-hearing, rather than completely deaf. However, many of the d/Deaf people I know still have a tiny bit of residual hearing, and use hearing aids to get a bit of sound.
I can see the idea being useful for other purposes, some places have special sounds that might be interesting to people who are looking for places to go that could enrich the maps experience. Examples I can think off:
- screams from a really good roller coaster at an amusement park
- sounds of a bowling alley
- sounds of a busy market
- tram/trolley/streetcar bells
Many people use Maps for work or at work so the ability to turn the feature off would be essential.
I do note that you can currently contribute short videos to Maps and this brings in the element of sound with the element of video.
I envisioned this as leading to something similar to Popular Times chart that maps now offers
That way people could see quieter and noisier times. And yes, I realize there is probably a strong correlation with crowd size. However, by seeing something like absolute dB, it would still say a lot about the noise level.
Oh, now I get you, you mean to find times when the ambient noise is lower which would make it more tolerable for someone using hearing aides.
Regards Paul
Either specific times or overall. For instance, at a quiet restaurant, it would show lower bars for every time slice. So it would give a general sense of the place as well.
Também gostaria de manter atualizado informações sobre libras
What can we do to contribute to the accessibility of deaf or hard of hearing is to invite them to discuss directly starting from the need assessment as what is needed deaf using Google Maps to get the quick response? how is the need form? create appropriate design concepts, trial error test until the product gets actually used. The most important and ideal are one feature can be used by all disabilities. Or in other words more inclusive features.
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@angoodkind nice idea for helping the physically challenged people.
Blind people can use voice navigator which is very helpful.
But for deaf… no issue they can see the map and find the location. what do you say?
John Peter
@PaulPavlinovich ha ha ha. Thanks for informing that moderators are watching 
For the hearing-impaired, I can see two improvements:
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Adding a feature where we can take sound samples at a location, and save it to google maps to build a sound profile of a location. Since I started this conversation, a new app has come out that is basically doing that: http://www.ihearu.co/
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For any verbal directions in google maps, there should be an option to show the captions instead.
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