Co-Designing Auditory Navigation Solutions for Traveling as a Blind Individual During The COVID-19 Pandemic

A group co-design was held in March 2021 with six blind and visually impaired individuals (BVIs) from the US. Participants were asked to discuss problems related to travel during the COVID-19 pandemic and make recommendations for possible solutions. Two probes (prototypes) of a non-visual neighborhood travel map, and a non-visual COVID-19 choropleth map (a map using colors or sounds over each state to represent different values) of COVID-19 state data, were shown to participants for inspiration. Results were that participants revealed the mostly negative impacts COVID-19 had on feeling greater risk when going out, traveling, interactions with strangers, communication, navigating to changed familiar environments, and wearing masks. Participants gravitated towards the need for information the probes provided, and made a number of observations and recommendations for improvement. They wanted more detailed geo-referenced COVID-19 data, including by county, information related to voting, a mobile app, and more detailed building information, such as doors on the travel map.<br>This data includes the initial set of codes created by the coders, intercoder reliability checks, final codes, categorized codes, category context and descriptions, themes, and participant demographic data.<br>The Excel file is uploaded here, but a view only Google Sheets version can be accessed at:<br>https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zpGuL9cRhokzfhctgo-3ZjoDcC7HG801WRo4OgBO8_w/edit?usp=sharing<br>Make a copy of this google sheet and entering values into the top row of the "Filter" sheet will filter values by those keywords.