Enhanced Visual Cues for deaf drivers: Navigating without sound

As for the other instructions — the screen would briefly flash white to signal an upcoming speed camera. If you need to turn left, right, or even pull off a U-turn then a transparent version of the appropriate arrow marker would flash across the screen. They were eye-catching enough to engage your peripheral vision but not so distracting that they took your attention off the road.

Note: At the time of writing, the feature, now live in AmiGO’s public release, includes only turn warnings, turn signals and arrival alerts. But its developers tell us more functionality is in the pipeline.

Kanters first developed this feature at a TomTom Hackathon, a competitive event where software engineers and other specialists come together to design and create disruptive software or hardware. This is typically done within 24 hours and the products/features made in these hackathons aim to benefit the world of mobility. It was here, that Kanters first breathed life into his idea, he gave it the working name: ”Hearing Impaired Mode*.”

His idea resonated across the company. His colleagues saw his passion for the project and how it could make a difference. They wanted to help him succeed. “I felt that this was really important for Timon. And I really wanted to help him somehow and I didn't want to fail”, Ilse Vitse, team lead of Kanters’ Hackathon group, tells me. “That was my driving factor, I saw his passion and it just turned over to me as well.”

While the team was developing the feature, they originally aimed to integrate it with the GO Navigation app, but as time progressed, they saw a bigger opportunity.

Jump forward two years. The team began to integrate this feature into TomTom IndiGO, TomTom’s open digital cockpit platform. More team members were joining the project, spurred onward by Kanters’ infectious vision. Kanters’ description of how everybody worked together reminded me of a well-oiled machine, every individual cog working in harmony, moving from strength to strength as the feature continued to evolve.

Before they knew it, they had progressed through two hackathons. Kanters’ team didn’t waste the opportunities, using both events as steppingstones to improve the feature. They made further adjustments to the visuals, made a few more tweaks and finally began integrating the feature into AmiGO, TomTom’s free navigation app.

The feature is, at the time of writing, being rolled out to all users of AmiGO. It has been available in Beta for a few months already — the integration marks an important point in the “Hearing Impaired Mode” story. AmiGO is a free app, and it’s available to anyone with a smartphone, meaning there is no cost or barrier for hearing-impaired drivers to get a tailored navigation experience.

Testing has played an important role in Hearing Impaired Mode’s development. The team conducted several studies that helped them prioritize design elements and decide what new features to introduce.

The first survey was sent to 43 drivers who are hard of hearing. The results showed the app worked well. However, users requested the visuals be changed to make the arrows more transparent to not fully cover the map.

Katie Snell, a TomTom software engineer in the AmiGO team at TomTom, explained, “We decided to display an early indicator to show the instruction is coming up some time ahead. It's a bit further down on the screen, and pulses around the next instruction icon. The idea here was to make the user prepared to execute the instruction, giving them time to prepare for it.”

While the feature was originally inspired by a deaf driver, in testing, it proved to be incredibly useful for motorcyclists who wear helmets and earplugs and are often subject to lots of distracting road noises. Surveying 12 bikers, the team found that 80% of them were happy with the feature, even though it wasn’t explicitly designed for them.

This evidence suggested the team was witnessing the ‘curb-cut effect’ — a phenomenon where initiatives designed to benefit vulnerable groups often end up benefiting a much larger, broader group.

Take ramps over curbs for example. Designed to provide wheelchair access to the pavement they are used for far more than just that. Skateboarders and cyclists use them and even delivery drivers who are pushing a big trolley of parcels use them for easy access.

Sadly, the market has very few navigation features tailored to deaf individuals. With Hearing Impaired Mode, we finally see a navigation feature that is not only tailored to helping deaf drivers, but any driver who doesn’t like having to — or in the case of bikers, can’t — turn down the volume to hear their navigation instructions better.

Despite there not being many other alternatives, the best example of another navigation system would be Hyundai’s audio-visual conversion (AVC) and audio-tactile conversion (ATC).

The AVC enables communication with whatever happens outside the car by showing visual representations of sound patterns outside the vehicle on the Heads-up display. The steering wheel is also equipped with colored LEDs to relay information about the outside world to the driver.

The ATC system translates sound outside the vehicle into vibrations through the steering wheel, letting the driver know about obstacles and the distance from the car. Hyundai showed off how this tech works by installing them into a taxi in South Korea dubbed “The Quiet Taxi”. The driver of the taxi is deaf and navigated entirely using these tools.

While these technologies are useful, the major downside is their cost. It would be very expensive to outfit a whole line of cars with AVC & ATC systems. They tend only to be available to the minority.

TomTom’s Enhanced Visual Cues mode is now in TomTom AmiGO, the company’s free navigation app for drivers. This means anyone with a smartphone will be able to use it, making it probably one of the most attainable accessibility features in any navigation app. The app’s developers tell me Enhanced Visual Cues is being released for everyone using the app today.

Speaking with Kanters, it’s clear that he’s in pursuit of perfection. Along with his cohort of dedicated and inspired colleagues, it seems that we can look forward to a more inclusive and accessible future of navigation.