Towards a navigation system for blind people

Abstract

In this paper, we present an initial study towards of an indoor navigation system for blind people. As the system itself is still in an early stage of development, we conducted a Wizard of Oz study using a generic Wizard of Oz system designed for mobile and ubiquitous studies. The goal of the study was to validate a set of audio-based navigation commands in a field study context. Further, we wanted to identify usability issues of the Wizard of Oz tool, and ensure the appropriateness of the addressed study setup. Therefore, we used eight human wizards as participants in the study. Their task was to guide two blindfolded actors through a predefined route. Such settings helped us to achieve high ecological validity of the results compared to laboratory testing. We found that the developed study setup is fully mobile and can be used in any mobile context, the voice commands chosen for navigation are almost complete, and can be used with slight modifications for the follow-up study. Additionally we identified several usability flaws of the Wizard of Oz tool. After implementing the findings, the tool and the study setup are ready for a follow-up study with blind persons in order to validate the selected voice commands in depth.

Multimodal and alternative perception for the visually impaired: a survey

“…There are more recent systems in this category such as smartphone-based indoor localization system (Basso et al, 2015), electronic travel support system using 3D glasses (Mattoccia and Macri, 2015), and vibrotactile feedback on body and foot (Meier et al, 2015). (Polacek et al, 2012) Smartphone text-to-speech WOz prototype synthesizing voice commands for navigation…”

“…Figure 5 ConWiz setup (Polacek et al, 2012) Similar to TP3, Polacek et al (2012) uses a Wizard of Oz (WOz) testing approach to develop their WOz Prototype, which is part of the Contextual Wizard (ConWiz) system. WOz experiment is an experiment in which subjects interact with a system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being controlled or partially controlled by a person.…”

Challenges for usability testing in ubiquitous systems

“…However, most papers performed usability evaluation in Smart Homes [2,10,11,12,13] and Navigating System [14,15,16,17,18]. Other work performed usability evaluation in other domains [7,9,19,20,21,22] or not really performed any evaluation [8,23,24,25].…”

“…However, we found out that no paper identifies measures for usability testing that consider the characteristics of ubiquitous applications such as context information. Most of the identified measures are the same used in traditional usability testing systems, for example: List of Tasks Performed [9,13,14,15,18,20], Learnability [15,20,22,25]; Response time [2,14,16,25] and User Satisfaction [7,11,13,14]. Only three papers [8,19,24] have identified measures that consider the characteristics of ubiquitous systems.…”

“…Most papers [2,7,9,10,12,13,14,15,16,17,20,21,22] performed usability testing in controlled environments, not in real environments. Moreover, few papers presented specific approaches to usability evaluation for ubiquitous applications and, these approaches that have been identified are not specific to usability tests.…”