Uncovering information needs for independent spatial learning for users who are visually impaired

Abstract

Sighted individuals often develop significant knowledge about their environment through what they can visually observe. In contrast, individuals who are visually impaired mostly acquire such knowledge about their environment through information that is explicitly related to them. This paper examines the practices that visually impaired individuals use to learn about their environments and the associated challenges. In the first of our two studies, we uncover four types of information needed to master and navigate the environment. We detail how individuals' context impacts their ability to learn this information, and outline requirements for independent spatial learning. In a second study, we explore how individuals learn about places and activities in their environment. Our findings show that users not only learn information to satisfy their immediate needs, but also to enable future opportunitiessomething existing technologies do not fully support. From these findings, we discuss future research and design opportunities to assist the visually impaired in independent spatial learning.

Visually impaired orientation techniques in unfamiliar indoor environments

“…Many works such as [3], [6] discuss such issues with a focus on eliciting requirements to build an indoor orientation aid. While such work facilitates many issues that relate to indoor orientation, none have discussed factors that affect individuals' orientation indoors.…”

Where's my bus stop?

“…Guentert [11] describes a train station navigation assistant for blind travelers that pro vides detailed information on navigating complex stations. Banovic et al [2] examine how visually impaired people learn about and navigate their environments, noting that they not only satisfy their immediate needs but also learn informa tion that may enable future opportunities. Yang et al [29] describe Talking Points 3, a mobile location-aware system that seeks to make the environment more legible to blind and visually impaired users by representing important fea tures such as paths, landmarks, and functional elements, to support spatial awareness beyond procedural wayfinding.…”

Hacking Blind Navigation

“…Several researchers have been tackling this challenge with diferent approaches and from diferent perspectives. This includes, for instance, eforts to assess the requirements and information needs for blind navigation [2,21]; the design and evaluation of interfaces to guide the user [6,19,24]; the study or modeling of user behavior during navigation assistance [13,15,22]; the investigation of the factors that influence user acceptance of such systems [1]; and the use of crowdsourcing to ease the installation and maintenance of indoor localization infrastructures [10]. Still, most solutions present static interfaces that are not able to adapt to users nor diferent situations.…”