Presentation for the sixth "Web Accessibility Challenge" (W4A 2013 Conference). The "Open Touch/Sound Maps" is a mobile application that enables haptic exploration of OpenStreetMap data for the visually impaired users.

1. A Mobile Interactive Maps Application
for a Visually Impaired Audience
Presenter: Gottfried Zimmermann
Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas,
Thessaloniki, Greece
Authors: Nikolaos Kaklanis, Konstantinos Votis
and Dimitrios Tzovaras

2. The problem
 By accessing web mapping applications like the
OpenStreetMapOpenStreetMap through a mobile device, a sighted user
 can virtually explore a map area
 before actually go to the specific location
 using GPS & a suitable application, user can explore the map area
around his/her current location
 real-time
 However, users with severe visual impairments often meet
great obstacles in accessing such information, as the
interaction with this kind of applications is performed mainly
through the visual channel.
OR

3. State of the art
 PocketNavigator (Pielot et al., 2010)
 Android application
 uses vibration patterns to provide information regarding the position of user’s final destination
 ahead/left/right/behind – relative to user’s current position
 not fully accessible for visually impaired users
 Haptic GeoWand (Jacob et al., 2012)
 Android application
 location, orientation & distance information using vibration patterns
 not fully accessible for visually impaired users
 TouchOver Map (Poppinga et al., 2011)
 Android application
 vibration and speech feedback
 focused on the visually impaired but not fully accessible
 Ariadne GPS (Ciaffoni, 2012)
 iOS application
 text-to-speech, vibration, sound
 accessible for visually impaired users
What is missing?
An Android application fully accessible for the visually impaired users

4. The proposed solution –
“Open Touch/Sound Maps”
 Enables access to OpenStreetMap data for the visually impaired and blind
users using a common mobile device (e.g. smart phone, tablet) that runs on
Android.
 Multilingual
 Currently: English & Greek
 Modalities
 Vibration feedback
 when finger is on a road/crossroad/point-of-interest (POI)
 Sonification
 The pitch of a single-frequency sound is changing according to the
distance to the next crossroad (as distance becomes smaller, sound
frequency becomes higher)
 Helps user realize the distance to the next crossroad
 Music chord – when user’s finger is on a crossroad
 Text-to-speech
 Name of current road/crossroad/POI
 Visual feedback (for the partially-sighted users)

5. “Open Touch/Sound Maps” -
Architecture
Android device
OpenStreetMap
web service
Open Touch/Sound Maps
OSM retrieval
module
OSM retrieval
module
coordinates
coordinates
OSM
OSM
coordinates
distance to the
next crossroad
current road/POI name
vibration feedback
visual feedback
audio cues
speech cues
Multimodal
map
Multimodal
map
search criterion
Google Maps
web service
GPS
coordinates
search criterion
TTS moduleTTS module
Visual rendering moduleVisual rendering module
Sonification moduleSonification modulePosition
identification
module
Position
identification
module
Vibration moduleVibration module
OSM

6. “Open Touch/Sound Maps” –
Interface of the application
Menu navigation Typing a search criterion Map exploration

7. “Open Touch/Sound Maps” –
Map exploration using a tablet

8. “Open Touch/Sound Maps” –
Innovation/Advantages
 Alternative modalities in accessing map
information
 vibration, sonification, text-to-speech
 Enables the exploration of any map area around the
world
 not predefined map areas
 No special equipment is needed
 only a common mobile device running on Android
 Intuitive map exploration
 user simply moves his/her finger over the touchscreen

9. Future work
 Access to data coming from more web
mapping frameworks
 e.g., Google Maps, etc.
 Vibration patterns providing user with
different positional cues
 e.g., vibrating 2 times per half a second may
probably mean that user gets closer to a POI, etc.

10. Thank you!
 Questions
Video presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHBLKTWTvmg