Harnessing wireless technologies for campus navigation by blind students and visitors

Abstract

Navigating around a university campus can be difficult for visitors and incoming students/staff, and is a particular challenge for vision-impaired students and staff. University College Cork (UCC), like most other universities and similar institutions worldwide, relies mainly on sign-posts and maps (available from the college website) to direct students and visitors around campus. However, these are not appropriate for vision-impaired users. UCC's Disability Support Service provides mobility training to enable blind and vision-impaired students and staff to safely and independently navigate around the campus. This training is time-consuming for all parties and is costly to provide. It is also route-specific: for example, if a blind student who has already received mobility training is required to attend lectures in a building they have not previously visited, they may require further training on the new route. It is not feasible to provide this kind of training for blind/visually-impaired visitors. A potential solution to these problems is to provide navigation data using wireless and mobile technology. Ideally this should be done using technologies that are (or will shortly be) widely supported on smart-phones, thus ensuring that the system is accessible to one-time visitors as well as regular users. A study was conducted in order to identify user-requirements. It was concluded that there is no off-the-shelf system that fully meets UCC's requirements. Most of the candidates fall short either in terms of the accuracy or reliability of the localization information provided, ability to operate both indoors and outdoors, or in the nature of the feedback provided. In the light of these findings, a prototype system has been developed for use on the UCC campus. This paper describes the development of the system and ongoing user-testing to assess the viability of the interface for use by vision-impaired people. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.