Designing Guides for Blind People

Most blind users frequently need help when visiting unknown places. While the white cane or guide dog can aid the users in their mobility, the major difficulties arise in orientation. The lack of both reference points and visual cues are the main causes. Despite extensive research in orientation interfaces for the blind, their guiding instructions are not aligned with the users’ needs and language, resulting in solutions which provide inadequate feedback. We aim to overcome this issue allowing users to walk through unknown places, by receiving a familiar and natural feedback. Our contributions are in understanding, through user studies, how blind users explore an unknown place, their difficulties, capabilities, needs and behaviors. We also analyzed how these users create their own mental maps, verbalize a route and communicate with each other. By structuring and generalizing this information, we were able to create a prototype that generates familiar instructions, behaving like a blind companion, one with similar capabilities that understands their “friend” and speaks the same language. Finally, we evaluated the system with the target population, validating our approach and guidelines. Results show a high degree of overall user satisfaction and provide encouraging cues to further the present line of work.