Introduction

Indoor and campus navigation systems support visitors and other people in public buildings or campuses in finding their way around. These systems often run on mobile devices such as smartphones or smart watches. Some of them use Augmented Reality to present a live picture of the surroundings, augmented by arrows and announcements showing the way, or labels indicating relevant milestones on the way or marking the final target. Recently, AR glasses such as the Microsoft HoloLens, the Apple Vision Pro or the Ray Ban glasses have been studied as platforms for indoor and campus navigation systems.

A major challenge is to make these navigation systems accessible for all persons, including persons with impairments. Barriers can occur in situations including:

• Users must hold a mobile device or wear bulky and heavy glasses, but cannot do so
• The system depends on user gestures, but the user cannot gesture
• Visual user interaction but the user is blind or visually impaired
• Audible user interaction but the user is deaf or hard of hearing
• Complex user input and/or navigation instructions that the user cannot follow

In general, navigation systems should be cognizant of the users’ needs and preferences, e.g. not guiding a person in a wheelchair over the stairs to switch floors. Instead, all information on the way should be tailored to the user, e.g. touchable or audible milestones for blind users.

Invitation for contributions

In the Special Thematic Session on indoor and campus navigation systems, we welcome presentations addressing the issue of designing these systems so that they are accessible and highly usable by all persons including people with impairments.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Navigation systems running on mobile devices such as smartphones or smart watches
• Navigation systems running on AR glasses such as the Microsoft HoloLens, the Apple Vision Pro, the Ray Ban or Snapchat glasses
• General strategies for maximizing the user experience of navigation systems for all people
• Flexible user interaction patterns addressing all user groups, including non-visual and/or non-gesture interaction
• Alternative devices or alternative interaction concepts for special user groups, e.g. purely non-visual interaction, purely non-auditory interaction, purely hands-free interaction, simplified interaction
• Location identification technologies such as Wi-Fi, infrared, QR codes and their suitability for fully accessible navigation systems
• Identification of disability-specific routes and obstacles on the way, e.g. by crowd-sourcing or other means

Chairs

Gottfried Zimmermann, Competence Center for digital accessibility at Stuttgart Media University, Germany, gzimmermann@acm.org

Kevin Pakula, Competence Center for digital accessibility at Stuttgart Media University, Germany, pakula@hdm-stuttgart.de

Thorsten Schwarz, ACCESS@KIT, KIT Karlsruhe, Germany, thorsten.schwarz@kit.edu