Vibro-Audio Map

A multimodal map representation for touchscreen devices that combines vibrotactile feedback with synchronised audio cues to convey spatial information non-visually. Users explore the map by dragging a finger across the screen; when they cross a feature (a street, a room boundary, a seat), the phone's vibration motor delivers a characteristic pattern and an accompanying earcon or speech label identifies the feature. Vibro-Audio Maps were developed by Giudice and colleagues to let blind and low-vision users build cognitive maps of indoor and outdoor environments using only a commodity smartphone. They have been applied to floor plans, transit layouts, building navigation, and — as in Fink et al. (2026) — seat localisation inside autonomous shuttles.