Date: June 2022

On this occasion we have relied on the Red Cross volunteer, Andrés Oteo, to check the operation and design of the Lookout application.

Andrés is a blind person with whom we collaborate at TECSOS when analyzing and validating products for people with reduced or no vision, due to his extensive knowledge and experience. With the help of it, we have done a series of tests of the functionalities available in Lookout while Talkback was activated.

First of all, it should be noted that Lookout is correctly labeled and that the different warnings and sound messages included in the application make it quite easy to use. Next, our experience with each of the modes will be developed:

• Explore mode: It is the mode that has seemed less polished to us in the application, still lacking a lot of development to make it really practical.
  On the one hand, if you want to know what a relatively small object is, it is necessary to focus on it very closely so that it can be detected, or else it will give information about larger objects in the environment, such as a frame that is hanging on the wall. wall, or directly give wrong information. 
  Likewise, Andrés commented that the descriptions of the objects would have to be more elaborate. This is because the current version only says what the object is.
  For example, if you focus on a dining table with four chairs placed on the sides, the application only indicates that it is a table, but does not give information about how far away it is or if there is something on it. In addition, it does not indicate the number of chairs, in what position they are placed or if there is someone sitting.

• Food Label Mode: This is the mode in which Andrés most wanted to know how it works due to its great utility for day-to-day use.
  In general terms, this feature of the app complies with its premise, although in a limited way, since it mainly detects products from the best-known brands, being less common the one that works with white-label, unpopular or similar foods.
  In turn, Andrés told us about the existence of iOS applications that did the same job in a more efficient and better way. These applications that he mentioned have as an incentive the fact that in the event that a product is not detected, the user can take a photo of it and indicate what it is to later upload it to the database of the same application and thus further improve its detection function.
• Documents mode: It is the mode that most pleasantly surprised the volunteer, mainly because of its simple operation. Unlike many similar text extraction applications, Lookout very quickly captures the surface where the text is located, be it a sheet of paper or a screen, and emits messages to tell us in which direction we have to move the phone in order to capture all the text. text correctly. In addition, the text extraction is carried out automatically once the text is correctly focused, thus avoiding unnecessary operations and pressing through menus. Once we have the extracted text, Lookout offers us the possibility of modifying or copying it so that it can be edited or shared in another application.
• Text mode: Unlike the previous mode, this one does not have messages about whether the text is being focused correctly. What it does include is an audible warning when something has been captured. One positive aspect that we have detected is that, once the app has captured a text, it is not necessary to keep focusing on it with the phone since Lookout will read it completely.
• Currency mode: The identification of the euro banknotes is correct. During the tests, Andrés mentioned that his greatest fear with this type of functionality is that they do not detect if a bill is false or if it is damaged.

During the tests carried out, no type of operation or design error was presented, so we were able to squeeze the different functionalities.

Finally, we must highlight the conclusions that Andrés has left us about the app. In general terms, he is satisfied with Lookout, mainly because of its simple operation, being the document mode the one that he liked the most. On the other hand, the main negative points are the lack of feedback that it presents compared to similar applications and the excessive simplification of some descriptions. However, considering that most of the features are still under development, and the company behind it is Google, Andrés believes that the application has great potential.