Towards Identifying Design Paradigms for Describing Indoor Floor Maps to Individuals with Visual Impairment.
Published in CHI, 2016
Navigation, an essential facet of everyday life, is one of the big challenges faced by individuals with visual impairment. In-spite of the presence of aids like canes, seeing-eye dogs and GPS devices, they still face considerable difficulty in everyday navigation. While navigating indoors is relatively safer, it is still a stressful exercise. We propose to look into methods to understand the underlying principles to generate a verbal description specially catered to individuals with visual impairment (VI). We invited four individuals with VI to give sample ‘verbal descriptions’ of a building to their peers with VI. We picked a public building that houses the city’s disability services due to its familiarity with the participants. We then invited them to criticize each of the answers to obtain additional feedback. We then analyzed the answers to derive the structural and language preferences. A prototype system for automated verbal description generation was built using the derived paradigms and evaluated by a group of seventeen visually impaired people. Feedback obtained from the participants in our experiments suggests that this case study is indeed an effective approach for developing such a system.