Rethinking Accessible Prototyping Methods for Blind and Visually Impaired Passengers in Highly Automated Vehicles

Highly Automated Vehicles (HAVs) can improve mobility for blind and visually impaired people (BVIPs). However, designing non-visual interfaces that enable them to maintain situation awareness inside the vehicle is a challenge. This paper presents two of our participatory design workshops that explored what information BVIPs need in HAVs and what an interface that meets these needs might look like. Based on the participants' insights, we created final systems to improve their situation awareness. The two workshops used different approaches: in the first, participants built their own low-fidelity prototypes; in the second, they evaluated and discussed the initial prototypes we provided. We will outline how each workshop was set up and share lessons learned about prototyping methods for BVIPs and how they could be improved.