Abstract
This article reports on an empirical evaluation of the experience, performance, and perception of a deafblind adult participant in an experimental case study on pedestrian travel in an urban environment. The case study assessed the degree of seamlessness of the wayfinding experience pertaining to routes that traverse both indoor and outdoor spaces under different modalities of technology-aided pedestrian travel. Specifically, an adult deafblind pedestrian traveler completed three indoor/outdoor routes on an urban college campus using three supplemental wayfinding support tools: a mobile application, written directions, and a tactile map. A convergent parallel mixed-methods approach was used to synthesize insights from a pre-travel questionnaire, route travel video recordings, post-travel questionnaire, and post-travel interview. Our results indicate that wayfinding performance and confidence differed considerably between the three wayfinding support tools. The tactile map afforded the most successful wayfinding and highest confidence. Wayfinding performance and confidence were lowest for the mobile application modality. The simplicity of use of a wayfinding tool is paramount for reducing cognitive load during wayfinding. In addition, information that does not match individual, user-specific information preferences and needs inhibits wayfinding performance. Current practice pertaining to the representation of digital spatial data only marginally accounts for the complexity of pedestrian human wayfinding across the gamut of visual impairment, blindness, and deafblindness. Robust orientation and mobility training and skills remain key for negotiating unexpected or adverse wayfinding situations and scenarios, irrespective of the use of a wayfinding tool. A substantial engagement of the deafblind community in both research and development is critical for achieving universal and equitable usability of mobile wayfinding technology.
Highlights
It is commonly understood that individual mobility enables humans to live healthy, sustainable, and fulfilling lives (Golledge and Stimson, 1997)
We report on a case study with an empirical, mixed-methods evaluation of the wayfinding experience of a deafblind adult pedestrian traveler in an urban environment (Aarons et al, 2012; Fetters et al, 2013)
The central research question that we address in our case study is: In which way do spatial information provisions afforded by a mobile app, written directions, and a tactile map inform the wayfinding performance and confidence of a deafblind individual?
Summary
It is commonly understood that individual mobility enables humans to live healthy, sustainable, and fulfilling lives (Golledge and Stimson, 1997). Academic research on human wayfinding predominately subscribes to an artificial demarcation between outdoor and indoor wayfinding, with little change over the last decade (Giudice et al, 2010) Such separation does not apply to typical human travel (Kim and Lehto, 2013; Kray et al, 2013; Winters et al, 2015) and it is one of the factors that inhibits a consolidation of mobile wayfinding software, functionality, and data models for seamless wayfinding through outdoor, indoor, and transitional spaces (Vanclooster et al, 2016; Wagner et al, 2017; Yan et al, 2019). Few mobile wayfinding solutions consider the information needs of visually impaired, blind, and deafblind individuals, and the desired functionality remains fragmented (Swobodzinski and Parker, 2019)
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