Automatic derivation of on-demand tactile maps for visually impaired people: first experiments and research agenda

ABSTRACTTactile maps are essential tools for visually impaired people to comprehend space and to support the simple pedestrian trips made difficult by their disability. Tactile maps are created manually and printed by specialists, and it takes a large amount of time to create a new one, which prevents using them on demand for everyday use. As a consequence, researchers and cartographers try to automate this creation process, but the existing automated derivation processes do not include generalization or advanced stylization steps, which limits their effectiveness. This paper reports first experiments to include such complex automated cartography processes to provide on-demand tactile maps for visually impaired people. These first experiments were more intended to raise real research issues than solve them, and the paper discusses these issues in a research agenda to achieve automatically derived tactile maps.