COVID-19 has made traveling as a blind or visually impaired person much riskier and more difficult than before the pandemic. As a result, people with visual impairments may limit their essential travel such as trips to the doctor’s office, the pharmacy and grocery shopping and walks for exercise or leisure. Accordingly, the goal of this COVID-19 Supplement, which builds on and expands the work being conducted by the parent grant, is to develop a COVID-19 map tool that provides fully accessible, non-visual access to maps.

This tool will allow visually impaired persons to explore maps and preview routes from the comfort of their home, allowing them to plan their travel along safer, less congested routes using crowdedness data. In addition, the tool will present county-by-county COVID-19 incidence data in a fully accessible form, which will inform their travel plans over greater distances. Thus, this project will give visually impaired persons the tools and confidence to undertake safer, more independent travel.