Digital geographic maps (like Google Maps) are ubiquitous throughout our lives and are critical in many activities, but blind and visually impaired individuals (BVIs) have no access to this digital information. As a BVI myself, I have never viewed a digital Evacuation, service outage, fire, political, flood, hurricane, COVID-19 statistics, neighborhood, transit, campus, building, or any other map that can be critical for survival or to do a job independently, and this experience is unanimously shared by the over 40 BVI participants I have worked with in six map-related studies. My research is focused on investigating methods for presenting digital geographic information using auditory virtual reality that only requires headphones to view. The current methods of making digital geographic maps “accessible” to BVIs are through alt text, turn-by-turn directions, search box for the nearest address, or a table or list of data. Unfortunately, these methods remove spatial information from spatial data (e.g., points, polygons, and lines) and only leave textual information (e.g., names and addresses), which defeats the purpose of "spatial data." My previous research focused on defining the problem space, co-designing ideal solutions, and evaluating if the co-designed tool, Audiom, worked. Future research will be on comparing Audiom with current “accessible” methods of representing geographic information non-visually, co-designing/evaluating mobile interfaces, exploring methods for drawing and independent non-visual map creation, and co-designing with BVI data scientists to make a solution to help them independently do their job and answer research questions. Experience Audiom for yourself at audiom.net. Learn about Brandon at brandonkeithbiggs.com.
Facilitated by Brandon Biggs, Human Centered Computing PhD student in the Sonification Lab at Georgia Tech, engineer at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, and CEO at XR Navigation Inc.
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