Turn right: Analysis of rotation errors in turn-by-turn navigation for individuals with visual impairments

Navigation assistive technologies aim to improve the mobility of blind or visually impaired people. In particular, turn-by-turn navigation assistants provide sequential instructions to enable autonomous guidancetowardsadestination.Aproblem frequently addressed in the literature is to obtain accurate position and orientation of the user during such guidance. An orthogonal challenge, often overlooked in the literature, is how precisely navigation instructions are followed by users. In particular, imprecisions in following rotation instructions lead to rotation errors that can significantly affect navigation. Indeed, a relatively small error during a turn is amplified by the following frontal movement and can lead the user towards incorrect or dangerous paths. In this contribution, we study rotation errors and their effect on turn-by-turn guidance for individuals with visual impairments. We analyze a dataset of indoor trajectories of11 blind participants guided along three routes throughamulti-story shopping mall using NavCog, a turn-by-turn smartphone navigation assistant. We find that participants extend rotations by 17° on average. The error is not proportional to the expected rotation; instead, it is accentuated for "slight turns"(22.5°-60°), while "ample turns"(60°-120°)are consistently approximated to 90°.We generalize our findings as design considerations for engineering navigation assistance in real-world scenarios.