Requirements elicitation can be a challenging process in many systems. This challenge can be greater with a non-standard user population, such as visually impaired users. In this work, we report our experience and results of eliciting user requirements for a situation awareness indoor orientation system dedicated to the visually impaired. We elicited our initial system requirements through three different studies that focus on users along with orientation and mobility instructors. Also, we performed a knowledge elicitation through our studies to formulate our system's situation awareness requirements.Index Terms-Visual impairment, requirements elicitation, situation awareness requirements, assistive technology, and qualitative analysis.

Developing situational awareness for individuals with visual impairments can be a challenging process, as designers need to understand the environmental aspects as well as the users' needs. In unfamiliar indoor open spaces, individuals with visual impairments need to work around multiple disorientation factors that can affect their orientation and situation awareness levels. In this work, we report our experience and results of longitudinal user studies that were designed to facilitate cues that help raise the situation awareness level of individuals with visual impairments when exploring unfamiliar indoor open spaces. Through our results, we explain in detail users' disorientation factors in such environments.

Individuals who are visually impaired encounter a number of challenges when attempting to orientate their own position or the position of others in relation to them within an unfamiliar indoor environment. To design an orientation assistive technology, it is crucial to understand the factors that reduce the user's sense of orientation. In this work, we discuss the disorientation factors that resulted from three user studies, which were conducted to formulate the basic requirements for an orientation assistive technology to assist visually impaired individuals in unfamiliar indoor areas. Using the feedback we elicited from one survey and two interview studies, we shed light on the factors that reduce the user's sense of orientation in unfamiliar buildings such as noise and traffic levels.

This research is to design a user interface dedicated for visually impaired users to assist them when orienting themselves to unfamiliar indoor environments. Current orientation and navigation systems research focuses on providing feasible solutions to assist users, however less focus is given to the user interface level and how it enhances user's understanding of the surrounding environment. Our proposal is to apply the Situation Awareness Oriented design approach to enhance the user interface of the current indoor navigation systems for the visually impaired.

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