Navigator Wayfinding App for the Blind & Visually Impaired
Target Audience: Blind and visually impaired customers and potential customers; media; stakeholders; broad-based community; national and international organizations for the blind.
Strategy Objective:The strategy was to partner with Alphapointe, the second largest employer of visually impaired people in the country, and Sensible Solutions, the app developer, to create a wayfinding app that would enable blind and visually impaired customers to move about the corridor and the city, with greater confidence and ease. Specific instructions created by and for visually impaired people were essential to the successful launch. Educating our various stakeholders was accomplished through a promotional video, a video tutorial, social media and traditional earned media.
Situation Challenge: The Navigator wayfinding app for the blind and visually impaired was a planned innovation as part of the Prospect MAX Bus Rapid Transit launch. This BRT line is the third in Kansas City. KCATA was committed to bringing a higher level of innovation and technology to this line. And very importantly, at one end of the line is Alphapointe, one of the largest employers of visually impaired people in the country. This mobile application for blind people is the first time this technology has been applied to an entire transit line, as opposed to an intersection or transit station. We partnered with Alphapointe and the app developer to address the key challenges of this project: making sure instructions were clear, placing the beacons appropriately, and creating education materials.
Results Impact: The response was outstanding from local, national and even international media. We do not track visually impaired riders but know from our partnership with Alphapointe the growing number of employees and clients who are using the app and riding Prospect MAX to their location.
Why Submit: The successful educational effort has resulted in nearly a dozen requests for presentations and interviews and the number of blind users continues to grow. We now have plans to extend the app availability to the KC Streetcar line as well, opening up even more opportunities for the visually impaired.