B - DiNAMA: liberating the visually impaired users

Abstract

Navigation is extremely difficult for the visually impaired users. In this paper, we describe an Android application, the Direction Navigation Assistant Mobile Application (B-DiNAMA), as our initial work in liberating the visually impaired users to navigate through the neighbourhood conveniently including trivial locations and improve their accessibility via smart phones. B- DiNAMA makes full use of the speech recognition technology to indicate the current position of the user and the destination the user wishes to go by allowing the map to be preprogrammed accordingly. B-DiNAMA in return gives direction (via audio output) to the user and the directions are updated in every 5 meters as the user started walking. This paper highlights the lessons learned from the pilot user study, which should be significant especially in improving the application. The results of the pilot user study shows that the application is proven to be interactive, useful and efficient as the users used it.