What the Quest for Tactile Maps Can Teach Us about Making Interactive Maps

For those people who are visually impaired or blind there are tactile maps that can be read by touch. Like in visual maps, the tactual entities representing geographical features have to be carefully selected and placed on the map with respect to technical and sensory considerations, i.e. abstraction. A schematic map is abstracted beyond technical needs. It can support map-readers to better grasp the essential spatial concepts represented in the schematic map. This short paper first collects the constraints for constructing schematic tactile orientation maps that can be easily understood and used. It discusses how the knowledge about schematization principles found for tactile orientation maps and the lessons learned during the quest for those maps can benefit the construction of visual interactive maps. The aim of the transfer is that (certain types of) visual maps can be abstracted in novel ways such that the whole map then would be easier to understand. Keywords— spatial cognition, tactile map, interactive map, schematization