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

  • Authors:

  • Shiri Azenkot;Sanjana Prasain;Alan Borning;Emily Fortuna;Richard E. Ladner;Jacob O. Wobbrock

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2011

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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.