JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Inclusive design guidelines propose that indoor environments should support safe navigation for persons with blindness and low vision (pBLV), yet objective evidence linking design choices to navigability outcomes remains limited.

Objective:

We created a virtual reality convenience-store task to evaluate whether an inclusive (BLV-friendly) indoor configuration improves navigation under simulated severe diabetic retinopathy relative to a non-inclusive (BLV-unfriendly) configuration.

Methods:

Sixty healthy adults (thirty per condition) navigated the virtual store through the BLV simulation and were instructed to locate a target grocery item and place it into a shopping basket. We scored objective outcomes including task completion time, collision frequency, trajectory complexity, and proximity-to-object measures. To interpret collision differences, we also summarized collisions at the level of individual store objects. Subjective experience was assessed via post-experiment Likert-scale and open-ended questionnaire items.

Results:

The inclusive environment yielded a marked reduction in collision frequency compared with the non-inclusive environment (mean 5.70 vs 20.50; Mann–Whitney U test, P=.008; rank-biserial r=−0.396), indicating improved safety-related performance. In contrast, completion time, trajectory complexity, and proximity-to-object metrics showed no clear differences between conditions. Object-level summaries indicated that collision reductions were concentrated in specific navigation hotspots rather than uniformly across all store elements. Questionnaire responses were generally positive, particularly regarding the helpfulness of lighting and color-contrast cues, while open-ended responses provided qualitative context on perceived cues and challenges under simulated BLV.

Conclusions:

Taken together, these results suggest that inclusive indoor-design choices may provide measurable safety benefits under simulated diabetic retinopathy. BLV simulation in virtual reality offers a scalable method for comparing design alternatives and identifying collision-prone zones before real-world deployment.