Spatialized Audio Environmental Awareness for Blind Users with a Smartphone

Numerous projects have investigated assistive navigation technologies for the blind community, tackling challenges ranging from interface design to sensory substitution. However, none of these have successfully integrated what we consider to be the three factors necessary for a widely deployable system that delivers a rich experience of one’s environment: implementation on a commodity device, use of a pre-existing worldwide point of interest (POI) database, and a means of rendering the environment that is superior to a naive playback of spoken text. Our “In Situ Audio Services” (ISAS) application responds to these needs, allowing users to explore an urban area without necessarily having a particular destination in mind. We describe the technical aspects of its implementation, user requirements, interface design, safety concerns, POI data source issues, and further requirements to make the system practical on a wider basis. Initial qualitative feedback from blind users is also discussed.