Touching Space: Accessible Map Exploration Through Conversational Audio-Haptic Interaction
It provides a novel approach for BLV users to pre-explore spatial layouts through touch and conversation, supporting pre-travel planning.
Touching Space is an end-to-end system that combines haptic and audio feedback with a conversational agent to help blind and low-vision users build cognitive maps of unfamiliar environments before travel, addressing an underexplored gap in assistive navigation.
Most existing assistive navigation tools focus on providing real-time guidance for Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people, but few support building a holistic spatial understanding of unfamiliar environments before travel. Such cognitive map construction (e.g., knowing that a fountain is south of a tower and west of a hotel) is important for pre-travel planning, yet remains underexplored in prior work. To address this gap, we present Touching Space, an end-to-end system that retrieves map data for a target place and loads it into a frontend interface for exploration. The system combines haptic and audio feedback: users explore spatial layouts through touch and ask spoken questions to a conversational agent during exploration. Touching Space contributes a conversational interface that supports BLV users in building cognitive maps on commodity hardware.