ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES SUPPORTING BLIND AND LOW VISION PEOPLE DURING NAVIGATION

The thesis investigates navigation systems for blind and low vision people, proposing three main contributions. First, the thesis proposes two sonification techniques to provide guidance instructions to blind and low vision people during navigation. The proposed solutions are compared with a state-of-the-art technique showing that they improve the precision with which users move while navigating, in particular during rotations. Second, the thesis identifies a set of data management problems that have mostly been overlooked in the scientific literature, such as how to model the space. The contribution consists of designing innovative solutions for these problems and in showing that they significantly improve the navigation experience in terms of safety and clarity. The third contribution explores the problem of screen reader intelligibility in the presence of high levels of acoustic noise in the environment. Noise adaptation techniques are proposed and experimentally evaluated, showing that they significantly improve the screen reader intelligibility while also not distracting the user.