NavGraph: Enhancing Blind Travelers' Navigation Experience and Safety

Independent navigation remains a significant challenge for blind and low vision individuals, especially in unfamiliar environments. In this paper, we introduce the Parsimonious Instructions design principle, which aims to enhance navigation safety while minimizing the number of instructions delivered to the user. We demonstrate the application of this principle through NavGraph, a navigation application adopting a modular architecture comprising four components: localization, routing, guidance, and user interface. NavGraph is designed to provide effective, non-intrusive navigation assistance by optimizing route computation and instruction delivery. We evaluated NavGraph in a user study with 10 blind participants, comparing it to a baseline solution. Results show that NavGraph significantly reduces the number of instructions and improves clarity and safety, without compromising navigation time. These findings support the potential of the Parsimonious Instructions design principle in assistive navigation technologies.