A Collaborative Route Information Sharing System for Visually Impaired Travelers

Limited sensory information about a new environment often requires people with a visual impairment to rely on sighted guides for showing or describing routes around the environment. However, route descriptions provided by other blind independent navigators, (e.g., over a cell phone), can also be used to guide a traveler along a previously unknown route. A visually impaired guide can often describe a route as well or better than a sighted person since the guide is familiar with the issues of blind navigation. This chapter introduces a Collaborative Route Information Sharing System (CRISS). CRISS is a collaborative online environment where visually impaired and sighted people will be able to share and manage route descriptions for indoor and outdoor environments. It then describes the system’s Route Analysis Engine module which takes advantage of information extraction techniques to find landmarks in natural language route descriptions written by independent blind navigators.