CHARLOTTE -- Businesses in Charlotte are helping create a digital infrastructure for people with visual impairments to navigate the city.

The Blindsquare Event app tells users where they are, what they're near and how to get where they're going using audio commands with distance and orientation information.

But it can have some limitations

"When you walked inside a building you would no longer get information because [Blindsquare] was relying on GPS,” Laura Park-Leach of Metrolina Association for the Blind said.

MAB is coordinating a two-year pilot program with Bank of America to buy hundreds of Blindsquare ‘iBeacons’ for businesses in Charlotte.

The project is called, ‘No Dark Doors.’ Because, when complete, the 9,000 visually impaired people who live in and around Charlotte won’t be walking into an uptown building with no information, or, dark.

The app connects to the iBeacons through Bluetooth and continues to give information to users when they walk into a building, providing information to navigate the inside like seating and where the restrooms are.

When people using Blindsquare walk into a building with an iBeacon, it can keep telling them how to get around.

"The idea is that any door in Uptown will have this available,” Park Leach said.

MAB is placing 200 iBeacons through Uptown and South End during the first phase of, ‘No Dark Doors.’

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is the first building to install the iBeacons.  CATS, CDOT, Bank of America, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the Magnolia Emporium are the first confirmed partners to install iBeacons in their buildings. 

“Instead of me memorizing this whole city in my head, I can use these apps to kind of do the work for me,” said Sarah Milledge, a Charlotte area resident whose diabetic retinopathy took her sight 13 years ago.

The next phase of this initiative will work with CATS to map out the 128 bus stops in Charlotte's inner loop with the Bluetooth iBeacons, as well as Little Sugar Creek Greenway.

The project is scheduled to finish by the end of September.

MAB says Charlotte will be the first community in the world to have a citywide free use zone of the BlindSquare Event app.