XR Navigation

XR Navigation provides Audiom: The world’s most inclusive visual, auditory, and textual digital map viewer and editor. Close your eyes and imagine you walk into an exhibit hall at a conference, and it’s pitch black, your ears are overwhelmed with a constant barrage of sound giving you a headache, and the only comprehension of what’s around is the tip of your cane touching the ground, three feet ahead of you. Discomfort, anxiety, stress, and painful are the feelings you’re having. This is the experience of a blind person independently walking into an exhibit hall at a conference. Sadly, if a blind person tries to view the exhibit hall map beforehand, their screen reader normally reads “graphic blank”, which is completely useless. With Audiom, not only can they simulate walking through the space, but they can learn where the tables are, find stairs they need to traverse, and plan what to do when they get into this hall of chaos. Currently geographic maps are either completely blank or useless to 1.3 billion disabled people in the world, or the alternatives are textual elements (e.g., tables, turn-by-turn directions, nearby address searches, or basic alternate text) that completely remove the geographic information that makes a map a map! Audiom provides all the distance, direction, shape, size, orientation, and general layout for all points, polygons, and lines on the map. Audiom is also powered by the same data that powers a typical interactive visual map. It is currently the only Web Accessibility Guidelines AA compliant digital map viewer and editor on the market. Both referential maps (e.g., exhibit halls, campuses, buildings, parks, transit, etc.), and thematic maps (e.g., COVID cases, eclipse, election result, hurricane, weather, service outage, etc.) can be rendered in Audiom. Please reach out if you have a digital map that you would like to be made accessible: https://xrnavigation.io/contact