Affiliation:
1. Polytechnic of Coimbra, Portugal
Abstract
As reported by the World Health Organization, an estimated 253 million live with visual impairment that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses. It's necessary to bring awareness and understanding of the challenges blind people face and help to motivate research into new technology to answer those questions. This chapter starts to identify the challenges people with visual disabilities face in their life. The problem of navigation and orientation as well as the different possibilities to deal with the locomotion situation is also addressed. It describes the traditional navigational solutions as well as other which involves more sophisticated technological devices and their multimodal interfaces. The chapter ends with the description of the BlueEyes project, consisting in a solution using beacons to help blind people moving in a city. The phases of the project are described, and the actual research situations is also slightly explained.