Usability assessment of assistive technology for blind and visually impaired

In this paper we describe the usability assessment of a system designed to help blind and visually impaired people to navigate and perceive the environment. The proposed system is based on sensory substitution, remapping the vision stimuli into audio and haptic ones. The goal of this study is to aid the development of the sensory substitution device (SSD) by understanding how the different choices in encoding and rendering the environmental information affects the user's perception and experience while using the system. The preliminary results are presented to show the usability and usefulness of the proposed system.