CelGuider: A Low-cost Accessible Geographical Tagging System

The growing field of technology and development has brought to the world’s attention innovation in interfaces with regard to issues of social and economic inclusion, and yet there has been almost no work on accessibility in the developing world. This oversight arguably reflects the state of innovation in this space - despite research and development of several access tools to allow for greater physical navigation and social inclusion for persons with vision impairments, the prohibitive cost of such technology has restricted their use primarily to the developed world. With the range of communications and navigation options available through smart-phones, there is an opportunity to drastically reduce the cost of such access, in part off-the-shelf phones may offset much of what is offered by specialized devices. CelGuider explores navigation on foot and road vehicle transportation using location-tagging on a Google Android phone. This paper discusses the key design challenges for Low Vision and Blind users in the following areas: creating, updating, and storing tags at the phone, communicating audio information to the users, integrating GPS, power considerations, and the variability of tagging mechanics based on street architecture scenarios and proposes an interface for Low Vision and Blind users. Finally, we discuss the importance of much user testing for the contextual information necessary to understand individual and social practices around navigation, as well as cost factors for smart phones in the developing world.