Navigation of Visually Impaired People in Urban Areas with Environment Transitions and Use of Public Transportation

This thesis focuses on the problem of navigation of visually impaired people in urban areas. The main objective of this thesis is to enable seamless connection of indoor and outdoor navigation including the usage of the public transportation. Set of navigation instructions designed for sidewalk-based navigation systems focused mainly on environment transitions and use of public transport is presented. To that purpose we conducted two experiments with visually impaired people and evaluated our method on low-fidelity prototypes. Furthermore, we investigated the use of Bluetooth beacons as synchronization at route decision points, to overcome the possible lose of orientation and to provide error recovery for the users. To evaluate proposed solution, the high-fidelity prototype of navigation application was created for another qualitative study with visually impaired people. The outcome of the user experiments are the recommendations for the future design of the navigation system for visually impaired.