VisionWay Accessibility

Conditions

• Persons With Visual Disabilities

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

18 Years - N/A

Healthy Volunteers

Not accepted

Interventions

• walking path — BEHAVIORAL
  Participants will be asked to walk a defined pathway through campus. From the preselected paths, the set and order will be randomized between participants.

Study Details

The challenge of outdoor wayfinding, critical for People with Visual Impairments (PVI), consists in helping users safely walk to a pre-determined nearby destination. The main focus of existing solutions from research and industry is to leverage the user's smartphone to receive safe moving directions either from a remote operator or smart app. However, multiple paths may exist to connect users with their destination, each one with unique characteristics in terms of accessibility and safety. Unfortunately, little to no attention has been paid in helping PVI decide, before even starting to walk, which path to take based on their accessibility. Thus, a barrier identified is that the followed path may not be accessible because sidewalk features such as potholes, uncontrolled crossing, interrupted sidewalks, and objects are not known in advance. The investigators' goal is to develop a mobile live, local, outside map framework called VisionWay, customized for PVI-user as a wayfinding tool to analyze, before starting to walk, the accessibility of candidate paths and choose one to the destination.

Key Dates

First listed

Jul 20, 2026

Start date

Feb 26, 2026

Status verified

Jul 2026

Primary completion

Sep 1, 2027

Completion

Sep 1, 2027

Study Design

Enrollment

100 participants (estimated)

Allocation

NA

Intervention model

SINGLE_GROUP

Primary purpose

OTHER

Arms

• Experimental: Recorded walks
  The study team will record videos of a subset of users walking on selected paths on campus. Participants may be presented with the maps ahead of the walk. Such videos may include video recordings from the perspective of the study team monitoring the participant. Additionally, personal recording devices such as GoPro/action cameras, or recording eyeglasses may be provided to the participant to record walks from their perspective. From the preselected paths, the set and order will be randomized between participants. The study team will prompt participants after each path to identify and describe path features that affect accessibility, as well as to provide a perceived accessibility score (on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is highly accessible). The video recording may include audio description of these relevant sidewalk features and the score. The research team member will record their observations of the walking paths as well.

Primary Outcome Measure

PVI accessibility on sidewalks [ Time Frame: For a period over 2 hours ]

Central Contacts

• Abigail Larsen, MPH
  614-293-5287
  [email protected]
• Matt Patton
  614-293-5287
  [email protected]

Locations (2)

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