Project Sparrow
Visual impairments make autonomous living a challenge for many people. Daily practices can become big hurdles that take a lot of energy. In this project we developed a tool that has the potential to make navigation in supermarkets easier for the visually impaired.
Teammates: Ceren Ugurlu, Reinis Melgalvis, Willem Wolswijk
Origins of the project
This project was part of an honours course focused on developing solutions for visually impaired people. My team set out to tackle navigation. through some field research we quickly realised supermarkets are a good place to start. They are a basic necessity, their inaccessibility deemed a big obstacle towards an indepedent life, by the people we spoke. They are also low hanging fruit: their floorplan is usually very simple, being neatly structured into aisles.
Ideas and prototypes
The basic idea was quickly birthed. We imagined an app that could tell the shopper where in the store they were, and what was in the aisles they were at. This app would retrieve this information by scanning QR codes on the floor of the supermarket.
QR Codes
QR code stickers on supermarket floors as the carrier of information have several interesting advantages that make it a fitting approach for supermarkets. Firstly, they are cheap, robust and it is easy for supermarket personell to update them. Secondly, they reflect positively on the public image of supermarkets. It shows very openly that they take action towards an inclusive society to anyone visiting the supermarket.
Accessibility to the max
I designed the interface according to various principles we discovered during our research. Our prime focus was that the app should be optimised for use with screen readers, and for use by people with very low vision.
