Sonification of Pathways for People with Visual Impairments

Abstract

Indoor navigation is an important service, currently investigated both in industry and academia. While the main focus of research is the computation of users' position, the additional challenge of conveying guidance instructions arises when the target user is blind or visually impaired (BVI). This contribution presents our ongoing research aimed at adopting sonification techniques to guide a BVI person. In particular we introduce three sonification techniques to guide the user during rotations. Preliminary results, conducted with 7 BVI people, show that some of the proposed sonification technique outperform a benchmark solution adopted in previous contributions.