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Social VR has increased in popularity due to its affordances for rich, embodied, and nonverbal communication. However, nonverbal communication remains inaccessible for blind and low vision people in social VR. We designed accessible cues…
Pedestrian gestures play an important role in traffic communication, particularly in interactions with autonomous vehicles (AVs), yet their subtle, ambiguous, and context-dependent nature poses persistent challenges for machine…
Over the last decade there has been considerable research into how artificial intelligence (AI), specifically computer vision, can assist people who are blind or have low-vision (BLV) to understand their environment. However, there has been…
This paper introduces DogSurf - a newapproach of using quadruped robots to help visually impaired people navigate in real world. The presented method allows the quadruped robot to detect slippery surfaces, and to use audio and haptic…
The number of visually impaired or blind (VIB) people in the world is estimated at several hundred million. Based on a series of interviews with the VIB and developers of assistive technology, this paper provides a survey of…
LLM-Glasses is a wearable navigation system which assists visually impaired people by utilizing YOLO-World object detection, GPT-4o-based reasoning, and haptic feedback for real-time guidance. The device translates visual scene…
Bionic vision is a rapidly advancing field aimed at developing visual neuroprostheses ('bionic eyes') to restore useful vision to people who are blind. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use…
An estimated 253 million people have visual impairments. These visual impairments affect everyday lives, and limit their understanding of the outside world. This can pose a risk to health from falling or collisions. We propose a solution to…
Generative AI agents are reshaping human-computer interaction, shifting users from direct task execution to supervising machine-driven actions, especially the rise of "vibe coding" in programming. Yet little is known about how screen reader…
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is critical for ensuring trust and accountability, yet its development remains predominantly visual. For blind and low-vision (BLV) users, the lack of accessible explanations creates a fundamental…
Street imagery is a promising big data source providing current and historical images in more than 100 countries. Previous studies used this data to audit built environment features. Here we explore a novel application, using Google Street…
According to the World Health Organization, more than one billion people worldwide have disabilities. The field of disability studies defines disability through a social lens; people are disabled to the extent that society creates…
Finding a path free from obstacles that poses minimal risk is critical for safe navigation. People who are sighted and people who are visually impaired require navigation safety while walking on a sidewalk. In this research we developed an…
Traditionally, neighborhood studies have used interviews, surveys, and manual image annotation guided by detailed protocols to identify environmental characteristics, including physical disorder, decay, street safety, and sociocultural…
Visual impairment impacts more than 2.2 billion people worldwide, and it greatly restricts independent mobility and access. Conventional mobility aids - white canes and ultrasound-based intelligent canes - are inherently limited in the…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
In this paper, we propose a deep learning based assistive system to improve the environment perception experience of visually impaired (VI). The system is composed of a wearable terminal equipped with an RGBD camera and an earphone, a…
Street view imagery (SVI) has been instrumental in many studies in the past decade to understand and characterize street features and the built environment. Researchers across a variety of domains, such as transportation, health,…
To overcome the travelling difficulty for the visually impaired group, this paper presents a novel ETA (Electronic Travel Aids)-smart guiding device in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses for giving these people guidance efficiently and…
This paper presents PISHYAR, a socially intelligent smart cane designed by our group to combine socially aware navigation with multimodal human-AI interaction to support both physical mobility and interactive assistance. The system consists…