Creating a transportation app for visually impaired people
Romanoff, Oskari (2016)
Hämeen ammattikorkeakoulu
2016
All rights reserved
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2016121921003
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2016121921003
Tiivistelmä
Client for this thesis was Bernmobil. Bernmobil provides public transportation services in the Bern area by busses and trams. The idea for this assignment came from the interest to provide services for a specific target group, visually impaired people.
The goal of this thesis was to develop a concept of an assistive mobile application for visually impaired users to help them use public transportation by themselves. Literature research was used as the research method, which was based on the previous projects and reports on this field, including guidelines of the assistive application development and documentations about existing public transportation applications for visually impaired. The analysis and research for this project started by defining the problems, which visually impaired face when using public transportation. From a list of existing problems, four were picked which were found to be the most relevant. Guidelines for assistive application development define what is to be taken into consideration when developing an application for visually impaired users. Research of existing applications were used to define which features this kind of application includes, where they are used, and how the application for the visually impaired works. The conceptual design and interface of this application was based on the literature research.
The four major features of the conceptual application (planning the route, information about arriving vehicle, information while on board and information about abnormalities on the route) solve the problems defined by the literature research. Interaction between user and the application works by screen reader and touch-based gestures. The interface is designed to be simple, only including features that are relevant and necessary.
As a conclusion, companies and developers have made big efforts to design assistive applications for visually impaired. There is a lot of research concerning this matter on the general level. On the field of public transportation, there is still work to do. There are some public transportation applications that work locally in different parts of the world. World-wide there are only a few public transportation applications but they are not designed specifically for visually impaired users. So there is a gap to fill for Bernmobil to provide more accessible public transportation for their customers.
The goal of this thesis was to develop a concept of an assistive mobile application for visually impaired users to help them use public transportation by themselves. Literature research was used as the research method, which was based on the previous projects and reports on this field, including guidelines of the assistive application development and documentations about existing public transportation applications for visually impaired. The analysis and research for this project started by defining the problems, which visually impaired face when using public transportation. From a list of existing problems, four were picked which were found to be the most relevant. Guidelines for assistive application development define what is to be taken into consideration when developing an application for visually impaired users. Research of existing applications were used to define which features this kind of application includes, where they are used, and how the application for the visually impaired works. The conceptual design and interface of this application was based on the literature research.
The four major features of the conceptual application (planning the route, information about arriving vehicle, information while on board and information about abnormalities on the route) solve the problems defined by the literature research. Interaction between user and the application works by screen reader and touch-based gestures. The interface is designed to be simple, only including features that are relevant and necessary.
As a conclusion, companies and developers have made big efforts to design assistive applications for visually impaired. There is a lot of research concerning this matter on the general level. On the field of public transportation, there is still work to do. There are some public transportation applications that work locally in different parts of the world. World-wide there are only a few public transportation applications but they are not designed specifically for visually impaired users. So there is a gap to fill for Bernmobil to provide more accessible public transportation for their customers.