Location Based AT

Tightly connect to accessible maps are location-based assistive technologies. Both topics deal with geographic data and accessibility. However, the perspectives and the starting points are different. Accessible maps want to make geographic data accessible, while location-based ATs want to provide support for users with disabilities enriching application with location based data.

Contacts

Page author(s): Klaus Miesenberger, Reinhard Koutny, University of Linz, Institute Integriert Studieren

Keywords

Location based Assistive Technologies, Accessible Maps, Geographical Data, Navigation, Mobility

Description

Orientation and navigation are crucial tasks in everybody’s life and are essential for the mobility of an individual. Some types of disabilities can influence and decrease a person’s mobility. ATs in this field aim at supporting a person in performing these tasks and guiding him or her to the desired destination. ATs in this field do not necessarily include accessible maps, but they can, depending on the type of support which is offered.

Background

Basically, a distinction is made between:

ATs supporting mobility in general

This type of ATs do not provide active guidance, but they offer support to enhance the mobility of a person somehow else. For example there are several projects, which aim at detecting obstacles. This group of ATs is not necessarily location-based since the near-space can be explored by cameras or other sensors without knowledge of the user’s global location.

ATs for navigation

Orientation and navigation are tightly connected to each other. In particular, orientation is an obligatory precondition for navigation. One, or at least the AT, needs to know where he or she actually is, to know where he or she has to go. Therefore, all approaches of this group are location-based and need to determine the user’s current position. Some of them are designed for indoor navigation, some of them for outdoor navigation. Therefore, they use different approaches to determine the position. Outdoor approaches might use satellite positioning, like GPS, others use Bluetooth or RFID tags, depending on the specific purpose of use. Projects of this group are:

• AudioNav: A Mixed Reality Navigation System for Individuals Who Are Visually Impaired [Fallah2010]
• A Route Planner Interpretation Service for Hard of Hearing People [Boulares2012]

ATs for exploration

This group is also location-based and can consist of an accessible map. The purpose is the exploration of the surroundings. The type of information which is provided depends on the specific application. One approach might focus on making a sight-seeing walk accessible, another approach might allow the user to explore the environment and look for restaurants. Also very important in this group are approaches, which provide accessibility information of the surrounding environment. Projects which can be categorized in this group are:

• Web-based City Maps for Blind and Visually Impaired [Wasserburger2011]

Discussion

AAL

ATs in the field of ambient assisted living sometimes include location-based content to support the elderly or disabled person to handle their everyday life in his or her home. They are normally used to track the person to analyze the person’s behavior and determine activities. This can be used for example to recognize unusual behavior and identify dangerous situations. Some projects in this field are:

• Context-aware Human Activity Recognition and decision making [Khattak2010]
• Localization Technologies for Indoor Human Tracking [Da2010]
• Remote tracking patients in retirement home using wireless multisensor system[Campo2010]

Making location-based applications accessible

Today, no standard exists that specifies how to make location-based applications accessible. However, there are guidelines to make applications accessible. Apple offers a guideline [Apple2012] for iOS and Google has a similar guideline [Google2012] for Android. Programmers considering these recommendations allow the underlying OS to access the UI and provide accessibility features to the user. Since, location-based application do not always rely on visual maps, these guidelines might be enough to make an application accessible. If an application includes a visual map, the providence of the same detail of information is more complicated. Several ongoing projects focus on this issue and often try to reduce the level of detail to a level that is still sufficient for the user to perform the desired tasks. For more details about guidelines and techniques used, see the chapters “Guidelines and Standards” and “Techniques to make Visual Maps Accessible”.

Accessibility Map Annotations

Maps and map-based applications can be made accessible on the user interface level to some extent, but in many cases this approach is not sufficient alone. Changing and extending the content is essential too[Haptimap2012]. Annotations providing additional information about the accessibility of trails or buildings are of utmost importance. For example wheelchair users need information about the accessibility of railway stations. Today, there are several projects aiming at providing a platform to share this kind of information. However, the information is incomplete and mostly just available in bigger cities and there is no standard how to annotate this data. The type of annotation providing the accessibility information depends on the specific target group. Wheelchair users do have other requirements than people with visual disabilities.

The following projects aim at this issue:

• Haptimap: Haptic, Audio and Visual Interfaces for Maps and Location Based Service: This project aims at development of accessible user interfaces for visual maps and navigation services and recommends guidelines for content generation [Haptimap2012]
• Look and Listen Map: this services uses annotations for disabled people to perform special route planning [LookandListenMapConsortium2012]
• OSM (Openstreetmaps) also provides the possibility to create accessibility annotation for wheelchair users [OSMforwheelchairusers2012]
• Openstreetmaps provides an overview of projects focusing on accessibility for people with disabilities [OSM2012]

Annotation and Authoring of Accessible Maps

Annotation and authoring of accessibility content in maps is the precondition to provide useful information to people who want to use geo-annotation-based ATs. This data can originate from various sources. Governmental organizations can provide information about the accessibility of buildings or trails. Road works are important information which is often provided by the governmental organization responsible for that. However, this kind of data is normally neither complete nor up-to-date all the time. The manipulation and extension of this data by the target group itself which is directly confronted with this subject every day, is a frequently requested demand. The users of ATs which rely on accessibility information about the environment can enhance the provided content on their own and enrich the usefulness of the AT. Some mobile editors do already exist [OSM2012a], but they are not specially designed to meet the requirements of people with disabilities

References

• [apple2012]Apple Inc., Accessibility Programming Guide for iOS: Accessibility on iPhone, http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/iPhoneAccessibility/Accessibility_on_iPhone/Accessibility_on_iPhone.html, 2012
• [boulares2012]Boulares, Mehrez and Jemni, Mohamed, A route planner interpretation service for hard of hearing people, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs - Volume Part II, Springer-Verlag, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31534-3_9, 2012
• [campo2010]Campo, E. and Bonhomme, S. and Chan, M. and Esteve, D., Remote tracking patients in retirement home using wireless multisensor system, e-Health Networking Applications and Services (Healthcom), 2010 12th IEEE International Conference on, 2010
• [da2010]Da, Zhang and Xia, Feng and Yang, Zhuo and Yao, Lin and Zhao, Wenhong, Localization Technologies for Indoor Human Tracking, CoRR, http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/corr/corr1003.html#abs-1003-1833, 2010
• [fallah2010]Fallah, Navid, AudioNav: a mixed reality navigation system for individuals who are visually impaired, SIGACCESS Access. Comput., ACM, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1731849.1731853, 2010
• [google2012]Google Inc., Using Google products: How to use accessibility features, http://www.google.com/accessibility/products/, 2012
• [haptimap2012]Haptimap Consortium, HaptiMap, 2012
• [khattak2010]Khattak, A.M. and La The Vinh and Dang Viet Hung and Phan Tran Ho Truc and Le Xuan Hung and Guan, D. and Pervez, Z. and Manhyung Han and Sungyoung Lee and Young-Koo Lee, Context-aware Human Activity Recognition and decision making, e-Health Networking Applications and Services (Healthcom), 2010 12th IEEE International Conference on, 2010
• [lookandlistenmapconsortium2012]Look and Listen Map Consortium, Look and Listen Map, 2012
• [osm2012]OSM, Accessiblity on OpenStreetMaps, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Accessibility, 2012
• [osm2012a]OSM, Editing, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editing, 2012
• [osmforwheelchairusers2012]OSM for wheelchairusers, OSM for wheelchairusers, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editing, 2012
• [wasserburger2011]Wasserburger, Wolfgang and Neuschmid, Julia and Schrenk, Manfred, Web-based City Maps for Blind and Visually Impaired, REAL CORP 2011, 2011