Sonification of navigation instructions for people with visual impairment

Dragan Ahmetovic, Federico Avanzini, Adriano Baratè, Cristian Bernareggi, Marco Ciardullo, Gabriele Galimberti, Luca A. Ludovico, Sergio Mascetti, Giorgio Presti

Abstract: Navigation assistance services for people with visual impairment pose the challenge of providing accurate guidance through non-visual navigation instructions. This paper proposes two techniques to guide the user during navigation assistance, and in particular during turns and straight paths. Both techniques adopt a combination of speech and non-speech audio with the aim of providing continuous, accurate, and unobtrusive guidance. The two solutions differ in the sonification technique used to generate the non-speech audio. The techniques were evaluated in a real-world environment with nine participants having severe visual impairment. Experimental results show that one of the proposed techniques is significantly more effective than a baseline approach adopted in existing solutions, in terms of navigation accuracy during turns and straight paths. Thus, it is a practical and effective solution to the problem of non-visual navigation assistance for people with visual impairment.