A voice command interface for visually impaired on urban mobility

Abstract

People with any visual impairment need special support and tools to overcome the day-to-day difficulties in the urban mobility context. The human-computer interaction area (HCI) has studies investigating new technologies to provide more accessibility and usefulness to this group of end users. In this context, this paper presents the results of research that applied the design thinking method to understand the users' requirements in a group of visual impaired people that study in special institute that supports their teaching. For example, a common complain obtained from our field research was the wrong information obtained from pedestrian and service operators when they needed to know the bus routes. We have monitored visual impairment users in practical evaluations of usability and accessibility using the Rota Urbana Voicer tool, that provides an extension to an existing tool to search public transportation routes using voice commands in a smartphone. We have also identified different suggestions to improve our tool based on other studies in the literature.