Toward Self-Directed Navigation for People with Visual Impairments

ABSTRACTAudio navigation tools have the potential to help visually impaired people (VIPs) navigate independently, but today's audio navigation tools merely guide users to destinations rather than give users the full freedom to explore and navigate environments themselves. To address this problem, we present NavStick, a self-directed audio navigation tool for virtual environments. NavStick repurposes a game controller's thumbstick to allow a user to survey their immediate surroundings by "scrubbing" the thumbstick in a circular fashion. We also describe a user study that we are performing to compare NavStick with today's guide-based audio navigation tools.