VisionWay: Accessibility-Aware Path Selection for Wayfinding
Ohio State University
Summary
The challenge of outdoor wayfinding, critical for People with Visual Impairments (PVI), consists in helping users safely walk to a pre-determined nearby destination. The main focus of existing solutions from research and industry is to leverage the user's smartphone to receive safe moving directions either from a remote operator or smart app. However, multiple paths may exist to connect users with their destination, each one with unique characteristics in terms of accessibility and safety. Unfortunately, little to no attention has been paid in helping PVI decide, before even starting to walk, which path to take based on their accessibility. Thus, a barrier identified is that the followed path may not be accessible because sidewalk features such as potholes, uncontrolled crossing, interrupted sidewalks, and objects are not known in advance. The investigators' goal is to develop a mobile live, local, outside map framework called VisionWay, customized for PVI-user as a wayfinding tool to analyze, before starting to walk, the accessibility of candidate paths and choose one to the destination.
Description
Existing solutions include cognitive maps which can help PVI confidently walk in known locations but need to be built on experience, and thus cannot be used to determine the best path towards an unfamiliar location. In fact, previous research has found that PVI, to reduce stress and increase safety, before embarking on a new journey need to be informed about whether a specific path has a paved sidewalk, street crossing point, controlled or uncontrolled crosswalk, stairs, obstacles, and potholes. Knowing these characteristics ahead of time, i.e., before starting to walk, can help PVI make choic…