Re: Looking for Blind Users for a Study on Nonvisual Digital Maps
Interesting concept, in all my life, maps have been difficult for me. I have some vision, but not enough to really get the big picture when looking at a map, then if I would put the thing on a CCTV for magnification, I would see parts of it, then move around and see more parts, but it would be hard for me to sort of fit those fragments together into a mental image of what the thing actually looks like. My O&M instructor would make me tactical maps of a neighborhood, but that's time consuming, and very small scale, because even to make one of like an 8 block area takes so much cardboard and paint. I've also tried the Apple maps explore by touch thing, and it's neat, but I still feel like I'm not getting the big picture. I can hold on a street and start moving to follow it, but I can't really tell when its working and not, because the sound will sort of not change sometimes. I like Eurofly's atlas approach. It is very innovative and actually gave me some geography I didn't know about. But it doesn't do roads as far as I know, so you're basically moving around by unit to different cities. I think something that would work for me would be a map that I could start at a certain place and sort of use it to branch out from known areas. I could stick to known areas to A, reaffirm my knowledge, and B, to get to know the map software. Then, once I felt comfortable with it, I could start to branch out, learn the names of streets, and their direction of travel, and their location relative to known ones. Using a methodical approach like this, I could expand my knowledge of my city.
There are two pieces to this equation that I see. The actual software, and the person using it. The way I see it, both of the pieces that make up this equation have to be good at what they do. For example: The software could be amazing, a gem, a masterpiece, and the person using it might have literally no idea how to make sense of what the software is conveying to them. Also, the software could be utter rubbish, and the person could be a tactical map wizard, a mental map cultivator, and have the sense of direction to go with it, and again, there's an issue. So I think people would benefit from at least some initial training in order to sort of get the hang of reading a digital map, as it were. Some audio content with written supplementary content I think would suffice in that department.
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