GeoCoach: A cross-device hypermedia system to assist visually impaired people to gain environmental accessibility

Abstract

Benefiting from today’s global positioning sys- tems (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS), visually impaired individuals are able to travel more independently than before. How- ever, due to a lack of accessibility information about geographic features, those navigation sys- tems fail to satisfy their special requirements. To help visually impaired people access and share environmental accessibility information in cities ubiquitously, this paper presents a collaborative and cross-device hypermedia system, namely GeoCoach. In addition to desktop computers, visually impaired people are able to access envi- ronmental accessibility on a pin-arrayed display and on mobile phones. The two user studies conducted with visually impaired users indicate that the proposed system was effective.