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Accessing 3D models remains challenging for Screen Reader (SR) users. While some existing 3D viewers allow creators to provide alternative text, they often lack sufficient detail about the 3D models. Grounded on a formative study, this…
Public urban spaces like streetscapes and plazas serve residents and accommodate social life in all its vibrant variations. Recent advances in Robotics and Embodied AI make public urban spaces no longer exclusive to humans. Food delivery…
Visually impaired people face significant challenges when attempting to interact with and understand complex environments, and traditional assistive technologies often struggle to quickly provide necessary contextual understanding and…
Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology, where remote sighted workers, i.e., agents, provide real-time assistance to users with vision impairments via video-chat-like communication. Researchers…
This paper introduces SurfaceAI, a pipeline designed to generate comprehensive georeferenced datasets on road surface type and quality from openly available street-level imagery. The motivation stems from the significant impact of road…
This paper investigates new data exploration experiences that enable blind users to interact with statistical data visualizations$-$bar plots, heat maps, box plots, and scatter plots$-$leveraging multimodal data representations. In addition…
Common fully glazed facades and transparent objects present architectural barriers and impede the mobility of people with low vision or blindness, for instance, a path detected behind a glass door is inaccessible unless it is correctly…
Street view imagery (SVI), largely captured via outfitted fleets or mounted dashcams in consumer vehicles is a rapidly growing source of geospatial data used in urban sensing and development. These datasets are often collected…
Transparent objects, such as glass walls and doors, constitute architectural obstacles hindering the mobility of people with low vision or blindness. For instance, the open space behind glass doors is inaccessible, unless it is correctly…
Seamless integration of virtual and physical worlds in augmented reality benefits from the system semantically "understanding" the physical environment. AR research has long focused on the potential of context awareness, demonstrating novel…
The navigation of indoor spaces poses difficult challenges for individuals with visual impairments, as it requires processing of sensory information, dealing with uncertainties, and relying on assistance. To tackle these challenges, we…
Most existing assistive navigation tools focus on providing real-time guidance for Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people, but few support building a holistic spatial understanding of unfamiliar environments before travel. Such cognitive map…
Geovisualizations are powerful tools for exploratory spatial analysis, enabling sighted users to discern patterns, trends, and relationships within geographic data. However, these visual tools have remained largely inaccessible to…
Imagine interconnected objects with embedded artificial intelligence (AI), empowered to sense the environment, see it, hear it, touch it, interact with it, and move. As future networks of intelligent objects come to life, tremendous new…
Visually impaired people face important challenges related to orientation and mobility. Indeed, 56% of visually impaired people in France declared having problems concerning autonomous mobility. These problems often mean that visually…
Most software applications contain graphics such as charts, diagrams and maps. Currently, these graphics are designed with a ``one size fits all" approach and do not cater to the needs of people with disabilities. Therefore, when using…
In an increasingly visual world, people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) face substantial challenges in navigating their surroundings and interpreting visual information. From our previous work, VIS4ION is a smart wearable that helps…
This paper investigates the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) to assist people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) in navigation tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4V, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro,…
Processes of urban planning, urban design and architecture are inherently tangible, iterative and collaborative. Nevertheless, the majority of tools in these fields offer virtual environments and single user experience. This paper presents…
Visually impaired individuals rely heavily on accurate and timely information about obstacles and their surrounding environments to achieve independent living. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of…