Abstract
Multiple approaches to support non-visual navigation have been proposed, of which traditional auditory turn-by-turn navigational systems achieved high popularity. Despite being modified according to the needs of visually impaired users, the underlying dataset communicated to the wayfinder is sourced primarily from traditional POI databases which are of limited use to blind navigators. This work proposes the use of environmental features spontaneously detected by blind navigators during their everyday locomotion as ‘local landmarks’ for enriching auditory navigational instructions. We report results of a survey which served to identify such environmental features. Consequently, we propose a list of potential local landmarks for the blind. Next, in a usability study, we demonstrate that enriching traditional turn-by-turn auditory instructions with local landmarks can improve the subjective satisfaction and confidence in navigation. Results indicate that the improvements seem to be achieved even without increasing the subjective complexity of the instructions. Finally we discuss how using local landmarks to enrich auditory navigational instructions can benefit visually impaired users.
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Notes
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It bears noting that the technique of communicating auditory information is, in itself, a research problem central to separate studies; however, the current work focuses on the content, and not the means of transmitting the landmark-enhanced wayfinding instructions.
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Two participants asked for the instructions to be read in German, instead of the English recordings.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on Rajchandar Padmanaban’s Master Thesis carried out at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Münster. The authors wish to thank Reinhard Silvers, Kerstin Gonschorrek and the Hansa Luftbild company for their support with data collection. We also thank all participants involved in the study for their time, effort, and many helpful advices as well as to Emily Harason for proofreading.
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Padmanaban, R., Krukar, J. (2017). Increasing the Density of Local Landmarks in Wayfinding Instructions for the Visually Impaired. In: Gartner, G., Huang, H. (eds) Progress in Location-Based Services 2016. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47289-8_7
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