Traveling More Independently: A Study on the Diverse Needs and Challenges of People with Visual or Mobility Impairments in Unfamiliar Indoor Environments

Abstract

It is much more difficult for people with visual or mobility impairments to prepare for a trip or visit unfamiliar places than it is for people without disabilities. In addition to the usual travel arrangements, one needs to know if the various parts of the travel chain are accessible. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous work that examines in depth travel behavior for indoor environments for both trip planning and execution, highlighting the special needs of people with low vision, blindness, or mobility impairments (MIs). In this article, we present a survey of 125 participants with blindness, low vision, and MIs. We investigate how mobile they are, what strategies they use to prepare a journey to an unknown building, how they orient themselves there, and what materials they use. For all three groups, our results provide insights into the problem space of the specific information needs when planning and executing a trip. We found that most of our participants have specific mobility problems depending on their disability. Feedback from the participants reveals that there is a large information gap, especially for orientation in buildings, regarding availability of high-quality digital, tactile, and printable indoor maps; accessibility of buildings; and mobility supporting systems. In particular, there is a lack of available and high-quality indoor maps. Our analysis also points out that the specific needs differ for the three groups. Besides the expected between-group differences, large in-group differences can also be found. The current article is an expanded version of earlier work [18] augmented by data of people with MIs.