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ACCESSIBLE
MAPS
An Inclusive Design Case Study
Aneesha Lakra | Jasmine Kaur | Rachit Bhayana
Problem
Statement
Domain
Colourblind people have a color vision deficit that makes it difficult for them to live everyday life independently.
Independent Living
Inclusion/ Accessibility
For Colour vision exclusion
Project
Learnings
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This project helped us develop design thinking skills pertaining to inclusive design particularly understanding and including human aspects of various special and excluded populations.
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We were able to critique research and exisiting design solutions from inclusive design and accessibility perspectives.
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We understood how to plan and produce proof-of-concepts for accessibility analysis and testing.
EnChroma lenses provide color improvement to help appreciate actual colour.​
Adds additional vibrancy to the colors.
Availability of variety of glasses for different colour blindness.
Doesn't improve global color contrast since it alters the vision in a global sense.
Doesn't improve global color contrast since it alters the vision in a global sense.
Has a color shift mode for personalisation.
It shows colours on a spectrum name of the color.
Colourblind Pal, a mobile based application which helps you inspect the colours in the objects around you by scanning it through your phone.
Nix is a tangible device that helps you pick colours of any product around you and dispaly it on your phone.
Doesn’t provide immediate conversion.
Need to connect the device to app.
Save one’s favorite colors in the application.
Application helps view different colors.
“I often find it difficult to use the data visualisation tools due to presence of multiple colors which are hard for me to identify”
We conducted semi-structured interviews for six colourblind participants. We discussed in depth the problems they faced because of their colour vision deficiency and asked them to share experiences and stories with us. Interviews were analysed using thematic coding and the following four themes arose:
Dependency
on Human Communication
Driving test: Roads are not designed to be inclusive and hence the law does not permit them to get licensed to drive. have a color vision deficit that makes it difficult for them to live everyday life independently.
Veg/ non veg icon: The green and red non-veg icon often comes without a descriptive label on packaged food.
Exclusion
from Social
Experiences
Photo editing: One of our participants always edited photos in monochrome because they were afraid of the potential blunders in the photo composition.
Gender reveal: One of our participants did not realise if they were having a nephew or niece till someone told them that the colour of the balloons was pink.
Detachment
from Society
Fashion: One of our participants was always left out whenever the other two friends in their group of three went shopping. Their lack of colour identification leads to mismatched outfits and poor fashion advice for friends.
Our team participated in brainwriting to creatively solve the problem based on our primary and secondary research.
Our ideas were inspired by current trends in technology, like virtual assistant and AR and even thermal gun used in covid screening.
We used Dot Voting Method to select ideas based on feasibility and innovation.
We made low fidelity sketches to visualise our selected ideas. Our solution ideas can be broadly classified into two categories - products to help people identify colours and products to help increase accessibility of products.
Identification of colours
Increasing accessibility of products
We used Map Style API from the Google Maps API and changed the colours, saturation as well as lighting of various features present in the map. We then created a Map ID for saving our map and kept the type as Javascript for the sake of prototyping. We then called a JS function to display a map on an online simulator. To check the correctness of the map created, we used an online color blindness simulator to verify that features we focused on are visible to the entire spectrum of colorblindness.
Our usability testing yielded positive results. One major feedback for improvement was for traffic. In most cases, people use Google Maps to navigate through traffic and expect to see a solution for the same.
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