Light My Way: Developing and Exploring a Multimodal Interface to Assist People With Visual Impairments to Exit Highly Automated Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents PathFinder, a multimodal interface designed to assist visually impaired individuals in safely exiting highly automated vehicles, demonstrating improved safety perception and reduced mental demand over auditory-only methods.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel multimodal interface tailored for BVIP exit assistance from HAVs, developed through user-centered workshops and evaluated in real-world scenarios.

Findings

PathFinder significantly reduced mental demand for BVIP users.

PathFinder maintained high perceived safety in urban and rural scenarios.

Auditory-only baseline resulted in lower perceived safety in urban environments.

Abstract

The introduction of Highly Automated Vehicles (HAVs) has the potential to increase the independence of blind and visually impaired people (BVIPs). However, ensuring safety and situation awareness when exiting these vehicles in unfamiliar environments remains challenging. To address this, we conducted an interactive workshop with N=5 BVIPs to identify their information needs when exiting an HAV and evaluated three prior-developed low-fidelity prototypes. The insights from this workshop guided the development of PathFinder, a multimodal interface combining visual, auditory, and tactile modalities tailored to BVIP's unique needs. In a three-factorial within-between-subject study with N=16 BVIPs, we evaluated PathFinder against an auditory-only baseline in urban and rural scenarios. PathFinder significantly reduced mental demand and maintained high perceived safety in both scenarios, while the auditory baseline led to lower perceived safety in the urban scenario compared to the rural one. Qualitative feedback further supported PathFinder's effectiveness in providing spatial orientation during exiting.