Mutual communication in navigation of visually impaired

Navigation system for visually impaired users can be much more efficient if it will be based on collaboration and utilization of distributed knowledge about the environment. For design of such a new system a research of communication of visually impaired users while navigating them self in certain environment is essential. The qualitative study has been conducted to gain insight into the problem of communication of visually impaired during navigation in unknown environment and hypotheses have been validated by quantitative study with sample of 54 visually impaired respondents. The results show that majority of visually impaired users already collaborate on navigation and consider environment description from other visually impaired sufficient for navigation and that the proposed collaborative navigation system has basis in natural behavior of the visually impaired users.