GeoCoach: A cross-device hypermedia system to assist visually impaired people to gain environmental accessibility

Benefiting from today’s global positioning systems (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS), visually impaired individuals are able to travel more independently than before. However, due to a lack of accessibility information about geographic features, those navigation systems fail to satisfy their special requirements. To help visually impaired people access and share environmental accessibility information in cities ubiquitously, this paper presents a collaborative and cross-device hypermedia system, namely GeoCoach. In addition to desktop computers, visually impaired people are able to access environmental accessibility on a pin-arrayed display and on mobile phones. The two user studies conducted with visually impaired users indicate that the proposed system was effective.