Designing Navigation Support for Blind or Partially Sighted Community

Research question:
Can a new low-cost tactile interface be developed to improve navigation, comprehension and reduce cognitive load of professionals or students who are blind or partially sighted.

Proposed impact:
Text to speech technology has greatly improved access to written text. The increasing prevalence of data visualisation or graphical user interfaces however still pose a significant challenge for students and professional who are blind or partially sighted. Spatial information is very difficult to convey effectively over audio and existing tactile interfaces are excessively large, expensive and non-intuitive to use and often do not fully integrate with screen readers. This research looks to design and create a device which addresses this gap.

Approach:
Following a traditional design process, this research will be broken down into two main stages. The problem definition and ideation and iterative prototyping stage. The problem definition stage will be comprised of a detailed literature review followed by gathering additional qualitative data to develop a detailed understanding of specific pain points or challenges participants faced. This could take the form of observation, contextual inquiry or participant interviews. Care would need to be taken to guard against sampling biases as the blind and partially sighted community can be segmented and difficult to recruit from. Quantitative methods could be used to gauge an indication of generalisability of findings from the literature review and qualitative research. The second stage would consist of an ideation stage followed by the iterative development of potential solutions. This will involve a combination of methods including codesign sessions, usability tests as well as longitudinal user testing potentially involving diary studies, experience sampling and usability data collection.