Abstract
Unlike sighted people, visually-impaired people cannot use a high performance pedestrian navigation system. Therefore, they must ask sighted people to take them to a place to which they have never walked before. And, they cannot know peripheral facility and scene in a place walking in everyday life. In this way, a digital divide occurs between visually-impaired people and sighted people.
The purpose of this study is to revise verbal map guidelines that show rules for describing features in a town to enhance everyday mobility. Therefore, this study figures out feature information visually-impaired people use in everyday life.
This study presents a review of earlier studies and related studies, and make a speech augmented reality (AR) application. Because a speech AR application can get information only for hearing, it is available to visually-impaired people like sighted people using a AR application. Then, two kinds of field experiments are conducted. The first experiment is a monitor experiment and has visually-impaired people use a smartphone which implemented a speech AR application in everyday life. The second experiment is a site experiment and has them use a pedestrian navigation system and walk in a course we set according to it. Finally, from the hearing result of those experiments, verbal map guidelines are revised.
This study shows a pedestrian navigation system necessary for visually-impaired people considering daily mobility needs. This system will lead to the early practical use and expansion possibility of a pedestrian navigation system for visually-impaired people.
