I am legally blind, and find it very difficult to travel independently in my  community. The bus system in my town is atrocious, ridesharing services are expensive, and walking by myself is dangerous. I am surrounded by suburbs, and very very small cities, which makes blind friendly infrastructure and services even more rare than they would be in a more urban area. Blind people like me rely on a multitude of different accommodations to help us get from place to place. A lot of these are computer and mobile applications that help us navigate and find access to services. There are quite a few options for navigation apps, but all of them have unreliable accuracy, especially in  Less populated areas, and some of them hardly get updated. Microsoft introduced a program called Soundscape about 6 years ago. The app had the most accurate GPS, gave the most detailed and helpful information about our surroundings, and had unique features such as street preview, a tool that let you explore your surroundings on a given street without actually being there. We were told from the beginning that this app was only a research project and would not last forever, but we didn’t think they would really just discontinue it. I guess they were just researching whether they could make money off of it? The app is free so I don’t even know what the point of having it or removing it would be. I can only Guess that they were trying to find out if it was worth their while in some form I heard that the goal of the research was to see how audio cues and 3-D sounds help the blind navigate, but again, why develop a whole app and also why take that Apple away? or another. So then don’t have it available for people to actually use and learn to rely on. The app would be removed from the App Store on January 3 and people who already have it on their phones would lose access to it by June 30. Even if they just left it in the App Store and didn’t update it, that would still be leagues, more helpful than the other inferior options that are available For at least a couple of years.  I honestly don’t know if this petition will actually change anyone’s mind, but I’m tired of not being a priority. I’m already terrified to leave my house alone as it is, and now that I finally found a tool that made me feel some confidence, it’s about to be taken away. It just feels a bit sadistic, and I wish that corporate America would stop making promises, particularly to the disabled, that they are not interested in keeping or maintaining.