Jido: A Conversational Tactile Map for Blind People
Luis Cavazos Quero, Jorge Iranzo Bartolomé, Dongmyeong Lee, Yerin Lee, Sangwon Lee, Jundong Cho · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019) · doi:10.1145/3308561.3354600
Summary
This demonstration paper presents Jido, a system that combines a touch-sensitive tactile map with a voice-based conversational agent to help blind people understand and navigate indoor environments. The tactile map is constructed from laser-cut acrylic sheets mounted on a case housing an Odroid single board computer. Twelve points of interest on the map surface are painted with conductive ink and connected to capacitive touch sensors (MPR121 boards), enabling the system to detect when and where a user touches the map. The conversational component is powered by Samsung's Bixby virtual assistant, which handles natural language processing and speech synthesis. Users interact through a combination of touch gestures on the map and voice commands. The system supports several interaction modes: confirming whether a point of interest exists, identifying what the user is currently touching, getting directions from the current finger position to a destination (which the user can trace with their finger), and receiving step-by-step guided navigation with confirmation at each step. A companion Android app (compatible with TalkBack) can receive directions for use during actual physical navigation after the user leaves the map. The authors chose laser-cut acrylic over 3D printing for faster, lower-cost production, and specifically wanted to evaluate the benefits of adding a conversational agent to tactile maps in isolation from other enhancements.
Key findings
Preliminary testing with 5 participants (average age 32.6, all born with total vision loss) in 90-minute individual sessions produced positive qualitative feedback. Despite none being Samsung phone users, all participants were able to use the Bixby conversational agent with minimal training. Participants particularly valued the ability to receive guidance and confirmation while exploring points of interest — one participant reported never feeling confident identifying POIs on a tactile map alone. A striking finding was that 4 of 5 participants had used tactile maps only a couple of times in their lives, not because the maps were unhelpful, but because they could never find them in public spaces. This highlighted the importance of Jido's companion app feature that provides directions to the map's physical location. Participants also expressed desire for deeper contextual information beyond spatial layout — for example, in a supermarket scenario, they wanted to ask the agent about specific product locations and get aisle-level guidance. This suggests that conversational tactile maps could evolve into comprehensive information points rather than purely spatial tools.
Relevance
Jido demonstrates a promising approach to making tactile maps more interactive and informative by layering conversational AI onto a physical tactile interface. The combination of touch-aware hardware with voice interaction creates a multimodal experience that addresses known limitations of traditional tactile maps — namely their static nature and inability to provide contextual detail. The finding that blind users rarely encounter tactile maps in practice, despite finding them useful, points to a systemic deployment problem that the companion app partially addresses. For accessibility practitioners, the work highlights that physical accessible infrastructure is only useful if people can find and use it independently. The prototype uses relatively affordable components (laser-cut acrylic, capacitive sensors, single board computer), making it potentially replicable. However, the study is preliminary with only 5 participants and no quantitative performance measures. The dependency on Samsung's Bixby platform also raises concerns about vendor lock-in and long-term availability. Future work exploring platform-agnostic voice interfaces and larger-scale evaluations would strengthen the contribution.
Tags: blindness · tactile maps · voice interaction · indoor navigation · conversational interface · assistive technology · orientation and mobility