Are the people developing driverless cars thinking about their implications for occupants whose eyesight or hearing is impaired...or nil? FR
I am sure they are, and their design departments will incorporate audio-visual communication alternatives to compensate. Even conventional cars already have quite a few of these – warning signs, flashing lights, click-click-click and bleeping noises, and even verbal communication spoken by a gender and in an accent of your choosing. And some won’t even start the engine or engage gear until they know you’ve got the message.
Even cars that give complete control to a human driver have started to acquire gadgets with extraordinary awareness. For example, they bleep if you stray outside your lane; they turn on the wipers if it starts to rain; they dip headlights if there is an oncoming car; the switch off the engine if you stop, and turn it on again when you want to move; some even “watch” the driver’s eyes and offer a polite wakey-wakey call if the eye movement and focus suggest the driver might be about to fall asleep.
Ultimately, a fully autonomous car will drive itself (no human inside) to pick up passengers, and every possible measure to guide and protect (itself as well as passengers) will have been exhaustively thought through and tested.
