Nicholas A Giudice
University of Maine, ME·Computer Science
Getting around safely and independently remains one of the biggest challenges for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, even after decades of assistive technology. These projects start from the view that most of the difficulty comes from current navigation tools, which give too little information, rather than from vision loss itself.
- Fields
Computer Science
Psychology
Engineering
- Topics
blind and visually impaired
visual impairment
assistive technology
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Develop user-centered design guidelines that specify which information and sensory pairings, such as speech, sound or touch, best support the most common navigation tasks across a whole trip for blind and visually impaired travelers.
- Build the MultiNav smartphone app, which links map learning before a trip with real-time navigation help and teaches its features through game-based training scenarios.
- Create exploration and traffic view modes in MultiNav that let users learn intersection layout, medians, accessible pedestrian signals and time-of-day traffic so they can hear and feel a street crossing in advance.
- Identify the information needed for indoor navigation by blind and visually impaired people and deliver it through multisensory smartphone interfaces inspired by human perception.
- Build and test a prototype indoor route-map tool that pairs turn-by-turn directions with map overviews, measuring spatial learning, navigation and usability in user studies with blind and sighted participants.
More about the research
Existing tools split navigation into separate pieces. They treat learning a route before a trip and getting help during the trip as separate tasks, and keep route directions apart from maps. They also often rely on a single sense, usually spoken language. Both projects aim to join these pieces into multisensory smartphone systems that combine sound, touch and language. One focuses on outdoor trips, including street crossings, and the other on navigating inside buildings.
Why it matters
Blind and visually impaired people face major barriers to safe, independent travel, and they have lower educational and job attainment and more social isolation than sighted peers. Smartphone tools that combine maps, route guidance and street-crossing information through sound and touch could make it easier to travel outdoors and to find the way through workplaces, university campuses and hospitals. Shared design guidelines could also help developers build better accessible navigation technology.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jenna Gorlewicz
Saint Louis University, MO·Engineering
Build the core content platform for Inclusio, a system that takes graphics in many data formats and outputs them to web and mobile apps, braille and tactile embossers, multimodal touchpads, and refreshable tactile displays.
Xiaojun Bi
Stony Brook University, NY·Computer Science
Create a non-visual free-form gesture input method that lets blind users enter whole words or phrases by tracing continuous gestures on the standard Qwerty touchscreen keyboard, removing the need to confirm each letter.
Hae-Na Lee
Michigan State University, MI·Computer Science
Develop detection algorithms that analyze webpage layouts, interaction workflows, user actions, and accessible navigation paths to identify deceptive design patterns, including ones created by mismatches between a page's visual structure and its screen reader reading order.
The school
University of Maine: 10 labs on PI Pages, $199M a year on research, 81 research doctorates a year.
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