The Journey Experience of Visually Impaired People on Public Transport in London

The use of public transport is critical for Visually Impaired People (VIP) to be independent and have access to out-of-home activities. Despite government policies promoting accessible transport for everyone, the needs of VIP are not well addressed, and journeys can be very difficult to negotiate. Journey requirements can often differ from those of other categories of people on the disability spectrum. Therefore, the aim of this research is to evaluate the journey experience of VIP using public transport. Semi-structured interviews conducted in London are used. The results show that limited access to information, inconsistencies in infrastructure and poor availability of staff assistance are the major concerns. Concessionary travel, on the other hand, encourages VIP to make more trips and hence has a positive effect on well-being. The findings suggest that more specific policies should be introduced to cater to the special needs of particular disabilities rather than generalising the types of aids available. It is also concluded that the journey experience of VIP is closely related to an individual’s independence and hence inclusion in society

Automatic identification in accessible iTV services: Proposal of an IPTV interface

Interactive Television (iTV) services that currently exist may be subject to a set of improvements in order to become more efficient and meet the needs of visually impaired users (VIU). The current television distribution infrastructures, since supplemented with a return channel and appropriated Set-Top Boxes (STB), open an interesting opportunity for the creation of an iTV service that integrates advanced features and can be automatically adjusted to the preferences of users with visual impairment. In this context, this paper proposes an adapted iTV service for visually impaired users complemented by an automatic user identification system. With this complementarity, the service can be dynamically adjusted to the preferences of the user that is in fact watching TV, automatically invoking the options previously selected in the respective settings