research-article

Investigating the Navigational Habits of People who are Blind in India

Authors:

Anirudh Nagraj,

Raghavendra SG PrasadAuthors Info & Claims

ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

Article No.: 33, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3441852.3471203

Published: 17 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Assistive navigational technologies offer considerable promise to people who are blind. However, uptake of these technologies has traditionally been lower in low and middle income countries (LMICs), where levels of investment and maintenance in infrastructure differ from upper middle (UMICs) and high income countries (HICs). In this paper, we describe a qualitative study undertaken with 14 people who identify as legally-blind in an LMIC (India) to understand their experiences and strategies used when navigating within a metropolitan area. We highlight a set of scenarios impacting people who are blind within the context studied. These include crossing busy highways, navigating in the rainy season, collaborating with others to navigate at night, and using older public transportation. Our work brings attention to areas where the latest successful and well-publicized innovations in blind navigation may fall short when used in an Indian metropolitan area. We suggest that designers should be cognizant of the role that infrastructure (particularly its shortcomings) and environmental factors may play when navigating in LMICs such as India, with a view to designing assistive navigational technologies to better match the needs of users within these contexts.

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Cited By

Kameswaran VRobinson JSambasivan NAggarwal GMorris M(2024)Help and The Social Construction of Access: A Case-Study from IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675606(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675606
Ayoka GBarbareschi GCave RHolloway C(2024)Enhancing Communication Equity: Evaluation of an Automated Speech Recognition Application in GhanaProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641903(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641903
Kuriakose BShrestha RSandnes F(2023)Exploring the User Experience of an AI-based Smartphone Navigation Assistant for People with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 15th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter10.1145/3605390.3605421(1-8)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605390.3605421
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Investigating the Navigational Habits of People who are Blind in India
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Accessibility
    1. Empirical studies in accessibility
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing profession
      1. Assistive technologies
  2. User characteristics
    1. People with disabilities

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image ACM Conferences

ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

October 2021

730 pages

ISBN:9781450383066

DOI:10.1145/3441852

Editors:
Jonathan Lazar
University of Maryland, USA
,
Jinjuan Heidi Feng
Towson University, USA
,
Faustina Hwang
Towson University, USA

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

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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SIGACCESS: ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2021

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ASSETS '21

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ASSETS '21: The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

October 18 - 22, 2021

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ASSETS '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 134 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

Kameswaran VRobinson JSambasivan NAggarwal GMorris M(2024)Help and The Social Construction of Access: A Case-Study from IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675606(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675606
Ayoka GBarbareschi GCave RHolloway C(2024)Enhancing Communication Equity: Evaluation of an Automated Speech Recognition Application in GhanaProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641903(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641903
Kuriakose BShrestha RSandnes F(2023)Exploring the User Experience of an AI-based Smartphone Navigation Assistant for People with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 15th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter10.1145/3605390.3605421(1-8)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605390.3605421
Chakravarty AChoudhary A(2023)Mobility Assistance for the Visually Impaired in Unstructured Environment2023 IEEE International Conference on Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics (SOLI)10.1109/SOLI60636.2023.10425228(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SOLI60636.2023.10425228
El-Taher FMiralles-Pechuan LCourtney JMillar KSmith CMckeever S(2023)A Survey on Outdoor Navigation Applications for People With Visual ImpairmentsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.324407311(14647-14666)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3244073
Kuriakose BCosescu IShrestha RSandnes F(2023)Mind Your Step: A Diary Study of a Person with Visual Impairment Navigating a City with a Smart CaneICT for Health, Accessibility and Wellbeing10.1007/978-3-031-29548-5_3(34-48)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29548-5_3

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