Route Descriptions, Spatial Knowledge and Spatial Representations of Blind and Partially Sighted People: Improved Design of Electronic Travel Aids

Abstract

The results presented here were obtained from an experimental study of blind people's experiences on two routes with very different characteristics. They are intended to answer three research questions on how blind people identify environmental features while travelling and use environmental information to form spatial representations, and the implications for the design of electronic travel aids to better support mental mapping of space. The results include detailed discussions of the mainly tactile and auditory information used by blind people to identify objects, as well as the different combinations of sensory information used in forming mental maps, the approaches participants used to do this, and the sensory modalities involved. They also provide a categorisation of the main features in participants’ descriptions of the two routes. The answers to the three questions include a discussion of the relationship between the sensory information used in route descriptions and mental maps, and the implications of the results for the design of electronic travel aids to support mental mapping, including suggestions for new types of aids and guidelines for aid design.