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Enhancing independence and safety for blind and deaf-blind public transit riders

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Blind and deaf-blind people often rely on public transit for everyday mobility, but using transit can be challenging for them. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 blind and deaf-blind people to understand how they use public transit and what human values were important to them in this domain. Two key values were identified: independence and safety. We developed GoBraille, two related Braille-based applications that provide information about buses and bus stops while supporting the key values. GoBraille is built on MoBraille, a novel framework that enables a Braille display to benefit from many features in a smartphone without knowledge of proprietary, device-specific protocols. Finally, we conducted user studies with blind people to demonstrate that GoBraille enables people to travel more independently and safely. We also conducted co-design with a deaf-blind person, finding that a minimalist interface, with short input and output messages, was most effective for this population.

References

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Braille Institute, Facts about Sight Loss and Definitions of Blindness, http://www.brailleinstitute.org/facts_about_sight_loss#5, accessed September 2010.
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Ferris, B., Watkins, K., and Borning, A. (2010). OneBusAway: Results from providing real-time arrival information for public transit. Proc. CHI 2010. New York: ACM Press, 1807--1816.
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Fischer, G. and Sullivan, J. F. (2002). Human-centered public transportation systems for persons with cognitive disabilities - Challenges and insights for participatory design. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (PDC '02). Malmö, Sweden (June 2002). San Francisco, California: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 194--198.
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Friedman, B., Kahn, P., and Borning, A. (2006). Value Sensitve Design and Information Systems. In P. Zhang and D. Galletta (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY.
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        May 2011
        3530 pages
        ISBN:9781450302289
        DOI:10.1145/1978942
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 07 May 2011

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        Author Tags

        1. accessibility
        2. autonomy
        3. blind
        4. deaf-blind
        5. public transit usability
        6. safety
        7. value sensitive design

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        CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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        • (2024)Shape2Vibe: A Tangible Tool for Vibrotactile Co-Design with People with DeafblindnessProceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3623509.3635264(1-6)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2024
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