Towards a navigation system for blind people: a Wizard of Oz study

  • Authors:

  • Ondřej Poláček;Thomas Grill;Manfred Tscheligi

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria;University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria;University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this paper, we present an initial study towards of an indoor navigation system for blind people. As the system itself is still in an early stage of development, we conducted a Wizard of Oz study using a generic Wizard of Oz system designed for mobile and ubiquitous studies. The goal of the study was to validate a set of audio-based navigation commands in a field study context. Further, we wanted to identify usability issues of the Wizard of Oz tool, and ensure the appropriateness of the addressed study setup. Therefore, we used eight human wizards as participants in the study. Their task was to guide two blindfolded actors through a predefined route. Such settings helped us to achieve high ecological validity of the results compared to laboratory testing. We found that the developed study setup is fully mobile and can be used in any mobile context, the voice commands chosen for navigation are almost complete, and can be used with slight modifications for the follow-up study. Additionally we identified several usability flaws of the Wizard of Oz tool. After implementing the findings, the tool and the study setup are ready for a follow-up study with blind persons in order to validate the selected voice commands in depth.