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Proficiency in Orientation and Mobility (O&M) is vital for people who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) to access physical environments and economic opportunities. While much engineering effort has focused on using technology to augment the practice of using a mobility cane, there is comparatively little work on using technology in service of teaching the use of the cane itself. We report a case study of a multi-year collaboration between assistive technology researchers and a certified O&M instructor at Perkins School for the Blind to utilize technology to create O&M teaching tools that use the concept of gamification to make such training more fun and effective. In this collaboration we adopted an action research approach, and through the application of action research HCI methods created several prototype systems for teaching O&M skills. These prototypes were refined to create the Cane Game: a system for teaching students cane sweeping technique using interactive music and sound. The Cane Game system can be constructed for less than $100 and is capable of being distributed at large-scale. A qualitative study of Perkins students' O&M educational trajectories while using the system illuminates the conditions in which this tool is effective as a teaching aid. 

Certified orientation and mobility specialists (COMS) work with clients who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) to help them travel independently with confidence. Part of this process involves creating a narrative description of a route and using specific techniques to help the client internalize it. We focus on the problem of automatically generating a narrative description of an indoor route based on a recording from a smartphone. These automatically generated narrations could be used in cases where a COMS is not available or to enable clients to independently practice routes that were originally learned with the help of a COMS. Specifically, we introduce Clew3D, a mobile app that leverages LIDAR-equipped iOS devices to identify orientation and mobility (O&M) landmarks and their relative location along a recorded route. The identified landmarks are then used to provide a spoken narration modeled after traditional O&M techniques. Our solution is co-designed with COMS and uses methods and language that they employ when creating route narrations for their clients. In addition to presenting Clew3D, we report the results of an analysis conducted with COMS regarding techniques and terminology used in traditional, in-person O&M instruction. We also discuss challenges posed by vision-based systems to achieve automatic narrations that are reliable. Finally, we provide an example of an automatically generated route description and compare it with the same route provided by a COMS. 

Recent work has shown that smartphone-based augmented reality technology (AR) has the potential to be leveraged by people who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) for indoor navigation. The fact that this technology is low-cost, widely available, and portable further amplifies the opportunities for impact. However, when utilizing AR for navigation, there are many possible ways to communicate the spatial information encoded in the AR world to the user, and the choice of how this information is presented to the user may have profound effects on the usability of this information for navigation. In this paper we describe frameworks from the field of spatial cognition, discuss important results in spatial cognition for folks who are BVI, and use these results and frameworks to lay out possible user interface paradigms for AR-based navigation technology for people who are BVI.We also present findings from a route dataset collected from an AR-based navigation application that support the urgency of considering spatial cognition when developing AR technology for people who are BVI.