Instant tactile-audio map: enabling access to digital maps for people with visual impairment
Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
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People with visual impairment generally suffer from diminished freedom in navigating an environment. A practical need is to navigate through unfamiliar indoor environments such as school buildings, hotels, etc., for which commonly-used existing tools like canes, seeing-eye dogs and GPS devices cannot provide adequate support. We demonstrate a prototype system that aims at addressing this practical need. The input to the system is the name of the building/establishment supplied by a user, which is used by a web crawler to determine the availability of a floor map on the corresponding website. If available, the map is downloaded and used by the proposed system to generate a verbal description giving an overview of the locations of key landmarks inside the map with respect to one another. Our preliminary survey and experiments indicate that this is a promising direction to pursue in supporting indoor navigation for the visually impaired.