Indoor-Outdoor Intermodal Sidewalk-Based Navigation Instructions for Pedestrians with Visual Impairments

Visual impairment limits people mainly in their travel related activities. Available navigation systems and aids for people with visual impairment solely focus either on indoor or outdoor environment and thus do not take into account their traveling habits - intermodal transportation. Verified guidelines for creating navigation instructions while transiting between different environments are needed. We present a set of navigation instructions designed for sidewalk-based navigation systems intended for transitions between indoor and outdoor environments and the usage of public transport. In two experiments with people with visual impairment, we evaluated our method on low-fidelity prototypes. We describe how we form the navigation instructions from sentence templates and how we envision the utilization of Bluetooth beacons.