Improving Public Transit Usability For Blind And Deaf-Blind People By Connecting A Braille Display To A Smartphone

We conducted interviews with blind and deaf-blind people to understand how they use the public transit system. In this paper, we discuss key challenges our participants faced and present a tool we developed to alleviate these challenges. We built this tool on MoBraille, a novel framework that enables a Braille display to benefit from many features in an Android phone without knowledge of proprietary, device-specific protocols. We conducted participatory design with a deaf-blind person and describe the lessons learned about designing an interface for a deaf-blind person.