The autonomy, independence, productivity and, in general, quality of life of people with visual impairments often rely significantly on their ability to use new assistive technologies. In particular, ...their ability to navigate by foot, use means of transport and visit indoor spaces may be greatly enhanced by the use of assistive navigation systems. In this paper, a detailed analysis of user needs and requirements is presented concerning the design and development of assisting navigation systems for blind and visually impaired people (BVIs). To this end, the elicited user needs and requirements from interviews with the BVIs are processed and classified into seven main categories. Interestingly, one of the categories represents the requirements of the BVIs to be trained on the use of the mobile apps that would be included in an assistive navigation system. The need of the BVIs to be confident in their ability to safely use the apps revealed the requirement that training versions of the apps should be available. These versions would be able to simulate real-world conditions during the training process. The requirements elicitation and classification reported in this paper aim to offer insight into the design, development, deployment and distribution of assistive navigation systems for the BVIs.
Using the methodology of in-depth interviews, this article explores how blind and visually impaired white cane users conceptualize urban space. The study presented in the article showed that the city ...is conceived, even without visual mechanisms, through landmarks, paths, edges, nodes and districts, i.e. the types of elements in the city image defined by Kevin Lynch. However, spatial representations of blind people are produced on the basis of spatial experience that is proximal and not distal, as was the case with Lynch. The article discusses elements of the non-visual image of the city that are constructed through direct touch and white cane use. Drawing on Lefebvre's stance on the interconnectedness of the body, practice and representational spaces, the author argues that the white cane is not just an aid that facilitates the mobility of blind people and helps to navigate in the urban space. As part of the 'practico-sensory totality' of the body, it also influences the ways in which the city is experienced and conceived.
Standardizing accessible test design and development to meet students’ individual access needs is a complex task. The following study provides one approach to accessible test design and development ...using participatory design methods with school community members. Participatory research provides opportunities to empower collaborators by co-creating knowledge that is useful for assessment development. In this study, teachers of students who are visually impaired, students who are blind or are visually impaired, English language teachers, and test administrators provided feedback at critical stages of the development process to explore the construct validity of English language proficiency (ELP) assessments. Students who are blind or visually impared need to be able to show what they know and can do without impact from construct-irrelevant variance like language acquisition or disability characteristics. Building on our iterative accessible test design, development, and delivery practices, and as part of a large project on English-learner proficiency test accessibility and usability, we collected rich observation and interview data from 17 students who were blind or visually impaired and were enrolled in grades kindergarten through Grade 12. We examined the ratings and item metadata, including assistive technology preferences and interactions, while we used grounded theory approaches to examine qualitative thematic findings. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
The loss of or impairment in vision makes it challenging for blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) to navigate easily in their surroundings. Several solutions were proposed to address this ...challenge and assist BVIP in navigation by exploiting existing technologies. However, their reliance on pre-installed infrastructure and costly dedicated hardware made them less practical. As an alternative, pedestrian dead reckoning techniques were proposed. However, the slow walking pace of BVIP, the required contact with un-intended obstacles, and the false recognition of activities increase error accumulation, making these techniques less applicable. Therefore, solutions are needed to accurately recognize the walking patterns of BVIP so that efficient navigation solutions can be developed. This article fills this research gap by extending traditional white cane with smartphone sensors. Specifically, a smartphone is used with a conventional white cane to collect data through its sensors on a time-based data window. For smooth recording, a revolving tire is attached at the bottom of the white cane. The collected data is processed by employing the computational resources of the smartphone using our designed app, which identifies the user’s walking patterns such as walking, stairs up/down, sit/stand, and collision. As a case study, these activities were classified using Naïve Bayes, Random Forests, J48, Decision Table, and LibSVM. Among these, Random Forests gave a higher accuracy. These results suggest that the proposed solution is more practical in designing navigation applications for BVIP and may yield better accuracy if tested with more advanced classifiers.
The textual data of a document is supplemented by the graphical information in it. To make communication easier, they contain tables, charts and images. However, it excludes a section of our ...population - the visually impaired. With technological advancements, the blind can access the documents through text to speech software solutions. In this method, even images can be conveyed by reading out the figure captions. However, charts and other statistical comparisons which involve critical information are difficult to be "read" out this way. Aim of this paper is to analyse various methods available to solve this vexatious issue. We survey the state-of-the-art works that do the exact opposite of graphing tools. In this paper, we explore the existing literature in understanding the graphs and extracting the visual encoding from them. We classify these approaches into modality-based approaches, conventional and deep-learning based methods. The survey also contains comparisons and analyses relevant study datasets. As an outcome of this survey, we observe that: (i) All existing works under each category need decoding in a variety of graphs. (ii) Among the approaches, deep learning performs remarkably well in localisation and classification. However, it needs further improvements in reasoning from chart images. (iii) Research works are still in progress to access data from vector images. Recreating data from the raster images has unresolved issues. Based on this study, the various applications of decoding the graphs, challenges and future possibilities are also discussed. This paper explores current works in the extraction of chart data, which seek to enable researchers in Human Computer Interaction to achieve human-level perception of visual data by machines. In this era of visual summarisation of data, the AI approaches can automate the underlying data extraction and hence provide the natural language descriptions to support visually disabled users.
Building new systems used for indoor objects detection and indoor assistance navigation presents a very crucial task especially in artificial intelligence and computer science fields. The number of ...blind and visually impaired persons (VIP) is increasing day by day. In order to help this category of persons, we propose to develop a new indoor object-detection system based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). The proposed system is developed based on the one-stage neural network RetinaNet. In order to train and evaluate the developed system, we propose to build a new indoor objects dataset which also presents 11,000 images containing 24 indoor landmark objects highly valuable for indoor assistance navigation. The proposed dataset provides a high intra and inter-class variation and various challenging conditions which aim to build a robust detection system for blind and visually impaired people (VIP) mobility. Experimental results prove the high detection performances of the developed indoor objects detection and recognition system. We obtained a detection accuracy reaching up to 98.75% mAP and 62 FPS as a detection speed.
In this article, a new design of a wearable navigation support system for blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) is proposed. The proposed navigation system relies primarily on sensors, real-time ...processing boards, a fuzzy logic-based decision support system, and a user interface. It uses sensor data as inputs and provides the desired safety orientation to the BVIP. The user is informed about the decision based on a mixed voice–haptic interface. The navigation aid system contains two wearable obstacle detection systems managed by an embedded controller. The control system adopts the Robot Operating System (ROS) architecture supported by the Beagle Bone Black master board that meets the real-time constraints. The data acquisition and obstacle avoidance are carried out by several nodes managed by the ROS to finally deliver a mixed haptic–voice message for guidance of the BVIP. A fuzzy logic-based decision support system was implemented to help BVIP to choose a safe direction. The system has been applied to blindfolded persons and visually impaired persons. Both types of users found the system promising and pointed out its potential to become a good navigation aid in the future.
We propose an automatic math expression reading system, called i-Math. i-Math is an educational tool, for blind and visually impaired (VI) students, to facilitate access to math materials. Although ...blind and VI students can access math documents/materials via many channels, e.g., human reader, math Braille codes, and audio (talking) books, these channels have limited availability. i-Math was designed to be an automatic reading aided tool and also a math learning and teaching tool for both students and teachers. i-Math operated with screen reader produce voice output on a computer. i-Math can read math documents aloud. Students can enjoy their newfound ability to read and practice math anytime and anywhere with i-Math while teachers can prepare their classroom handouts, assignments and exercises in audio version conveniently.
The evaluation of i-Math was conducted with 78 blind and VI students and six teachers. The evaluation results indicate that math materials can be easily accessible to blind and VI students through i-Math and then, they can independently and comfortably study and practice their mathematics.
Several technology-assisted aids are available to help blind and visually impaired people perform their daily activities. The current research uses the state-of-the-art technology to enhance the ...utility of traditional navigational aids to produce solutions that are more reliable. In this regard, a white cane is no exception, which is supplemented with the existing technologies to design Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs), Electronic Orientation Aids (EOAs), and Position Locator Devices (PLDs). Although several review articles uncover the strengths and limitations of research contributions that extend traditional navigational aids, we find no review article that covers research contributions on a technology-assisted white cane. The authors attempt to fill this literature gap by reviewing the most relevant research articles published during 2010-2017 with the common objective of enhancing the utility of white cane with the existing technology.
The authors have collected the relevant literature published during 2010-17 by searching and browsing all the major digital libraries and publishers' websites. The inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied to select the research articles that are relevant to the topic of this review article, and all other irrelevant papers were excluded. Among the 577 (534 through database searching and 43 through other sources) initially screened papers, the authors collected 228 full-text articles, which after applying exclusion/inclusion criteria resulted in 36 papers that were included in the evaluation, comparison, and discussion. This also includes research articles of commercially available aids published before the specified range.
The findings show that the research trend is shifting towards developing a technology-assisted white cane solution that is applicable in both indoor and outdoor environments to aid blind users in navigation. In this regard, exploiting smartphones to develop low-cost and user-friendly navigation solution is among the best research opportunities to explore. In addition, the authors contribute a theoretical evaluation framework to compare and evaluate the state-of-the-art solutions, identify research trends and future directions.
Researchers have been in the quest to find out ways of enhancing the utility of white cane using existing technology. However, for a more reliable enhancement, the design should have user-centric characteristics. It should be portable, reliable, trust-worthy, lightweight, less costly, less power hungry, and require minimal training with special emphasis on its ergonomics and social acceptance. Smartphones, which are the ubiquitous and general-purpose portable devices, should be considered to exploit its capabilities in making technology-assisted white cane smarter and reliable.
There is an increasing need to develop new adaptive technologies and new wayfinding assistance systems for blind and visually impaired persons in order to improve their daily lives. To address this ...need, we propose in this paper to develop a new deep learning-based indoor wayfinding assistance system consisting of detecting landmark indoor signs. Assistive technologies used for blind and sighted persons used to support daily activities to improve social inclusion are developing very fast. Training and testing experiments were performed on the proposed indoor signage dataset. Through the experiments conducted, we demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed indoor wayfinding aid system. We obtained 93.45% as a mean average precision (mAP) of the proposed indoor wayfinding and signage detection system.
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