Sonification of navigation instructions for people with visual impairment
Dragan Ahmetovic, Federico Avanzini, Adriano Baratè, Cristian Bernareggi, Marco Ciardullo, Gabriele Galimberti, Luca A. Ludovico, Sergio Mascetti, Giorgio Presti
Abstract
Navigation assistance services for people with visual impairment pose the challenge of providing accurate guidance through non-visual navigation instructions. This paper proposes two techniques to guide the user during navigation assistance, and in particular during turns and straight paths. Both techniques adopt a combination of speech and non-speech audio with the aim of providing continuous, accurate, and unobtrusive guidance. The two solutions differ in the sonification technique used to generate the non-speech audio. The techniques were evaluated in a real-world environment with nine participants having severe visual impairment. Experimental results show that one of the proposed techniques is significantly more effective than a baseline approach adopted in existing solutions, in terms of navigation accuracy during turns and straight paths. Thus, it is a practical and effective solution to the problem of non-visual navigation assistance for people with visual impairment.