Over the past couple of years I’ve had the chance to use GoodMaps in several venues and I want to share what that experience has been like. I first used it at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in California and since then I’ve used it at three locations in Ottawa: the Rideau Centre Mall, the Ottawa Via Rail Station, and the offices of the Accessibility, Accommodation and Adaptive Computer Technology (AAACT) Program where I work. Let me start by saying that I have good wayfinding knowledge, caning experience and travel experience, that having a tool like this changes the experience of entering an unfamiliar building in a way that is hard to overstate if you haven’t been the person who doesn’t see and finds themselves in that tsituation.
What is GoodMaps?
GoodMaps is an indoor navigation app. The easiest way to think about it is as the indoor equivalent of the GPS navigation you already use on your phone outside. Outdoors your phone figures out where you are using a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, compass, and cell tower triangulation. When indoors, a number of these technologies do not work reliably. For example, there is no way for your phone to know accurately what floor of a building you’re on. GoodMaps solves this by using a previously created map of the building. The building is scanned in advance using lidar, which produces a detailed three-dimensional map of the interior space. When you use the app, your phone’s camera looks at the space around you and compares what it sees to that pre-existing map to figure out your position. The key thing here is that the mapping is done once, in advance, and there are no physical Bluetooth beacons or other hardware that need to be installed and maintained in the building. Once a venue is mapped, it’s mapped, and you just open the app and use it. The app then provides you with turn-by-turn directions to destinations within the building, information about points of interest around you, and details about your surroundings.
Why Would Someone Who is Blind Want This?
Let me start with the thing that might not be obvious if you’re sighted. For a person who is blind, going to a new building isn’t just a matter of walking in and figuring it out as you go. It often involves planning in advance, researching/note taking, sometimes arranging for someone to meet you, coordinating assistance, and building your schedule around when and where that help will be available. If you’re travelling, you call ahead to arrange support at the station. If you’re going to a mall, you either go with someone or you accept that you’ll be doing a lot of asking strangers and hoping for the best.
All of that takes time, takes energy, and creates a background level of anxiety that sighted people simply don’t experience. You’re always dependent on someone else being available, being willing, and actually knowing where the thing you need is. And even when the help is there, you’re on their schedule, not yours.
This is what GoodMaps changes. It lets you walk into a mapped building and find your own way to the washroom, the check-in counter, the lounge, the boardroom, or the store you’re looking for without arranging anything in advance and without needing to find a person to ask. Yes, there are sometimes people around you can ask for help, but it’s less stressful, less anxiety-causing, and less time-consuming to be able to do it myself, and to have a backup for when there is simply no one around. Because there will be times when there is no one around.
Consider travel as the example where this matters most. You can arrange assistance at a train station and the assistance is usually good. You still have to find and navigate the route to the checkin counter and after that they will escort you through the station. Now, what often happens is that someone walks you to a waiting area and then goes off to help the next person. Now you’re sitting. If you want a coffee, or the washroom, or the check-in counter, or the lounge, everyone has disappeared and you’re on your own. Having an app that can tell you where the washroom is and get you there turns that stressful wait into a normal one.
Consider a new workplace. Visitors coming to an unfamiliar office for a meeting don’t want to be the person who can’t find the boardroom, or who has to ask where the bathroom is three times. GoodMaps lets them learn the key spots on their own without arranging for someone to walk them through. This is also relevant to my own situation. My team moved to new offices and the building was new to all of us. I had people walk me around the location and eventually after a month or 2 I developed a mental map of the areas I went to very regularly. We had a research project to put Goodmaps at our new location (we were the 1st place in Ottawa to implement it) and I can’t tell you how useful I found it. I now have a full working mental map of the floor, so GoodMaps helped me learn the layout. These days I mostly know my own floor and don’t need the app for day-to-day getting around, but I still use it occasionally when I need to find one of the smaller boardrooms or places I don’t go to regularly.
Then there’s shopping and when visiting a large unfamiliar mall. Aside from travel, as someone who is blind This is probably one of the more stressful things to do. You don’t really know the layout and stores upon stores on multiple levels. A mall is a place where asking for help is unreliable. You can ask a clerk where a specific store is, but if they don’t know, or they give you directions that assume you can see the orange sign 8 stores down, you’re stuck. GoodMaps knows where the stores are because the mall is mapped and it will route you to the one you searched for. It also lets you stop and look around, meaning you can ask the app to list what’s near you, so you can make a decision instead of wandering.
My personal experience
CSUN Conference
I first used GoodMaps at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in California a couple of years ago and it was a great introduction to the technology. The conference venue was mapped, including the exhibit hall, which meant I could actually navigate the rows of booths and find specific exhibitors on my own rather than being led around or guessing. If you’ve ever been to CSUN, you know the exhibit hall is a large, open space packed with booths, and for a person who’s blind that’s normally a lot of asking and a lot of wandering.
What really stood out to me was that the conference venue is full of routes that aren’t straight lines. The route from the hotel to the conference area, for example, is a curved arc rather than a simple straight route. GoodMaps handled this without issue, which was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a novelty but a genuinely useful tool. Following a curved path with turn-by-turn directions that update as you walk is the kind of thing that’s trivial with sight and genuinely difficult without it, and the app did it well. It meant I wasn’t 1 of the people who are blind at the conference who needed help to get back on route when travelling across the lobby and down to the conference.
At work – AAACT Offices
At work we have had many different wayfinding solutions installed in order to do real world testing with people with disabilities. Over the years, we’ve all the bluetooth beacon systemsand many other solutions setup to try and address common indoor wayfinding and navigation issues
The AAACT offices are a working office environment with boardrooms, cubicles, kitchens, washrooms, and the usual layout you’d expect. We moved buildings a couple of years ago. The building was new to us when we moved in. While traditional orientation and mobility training and non-technical techniques allowed me basic navigation. It was really when we installed GoodMaps that got me to the point where I felt comfortable and got oriented. As I mentioned, I mostly know the layout of my own floor now and don’t need the app for regular getting around, but it’s still useful for finding the smaller boardrooms or places I don’t visit often.
Where I see this
being most valuable is for visitors. Someone coming to the office for a meeting, whether they’re blind or not, can use GoodMaps to find their way to the sign in counter, right boardroom, the washroom, the kitchen, or wherever they need to go without having to arrange for someone to meet them and walk them there. That’s less stressful for the visitor and less disruptive for the people who work there. The freedom of the basic act of being able to get up during an all day meeting and walk out to the washroom without disrupting the meeting or asking someone to help you find the washroom you’ve never been to before independently can’t be emphasised enough. The current trend in our industry is unassigned seating in most of the workplaces our clients work in. In those scenarios where someone has to find a workpoint in a sea of workpoints goodmaps would be exceedingly important in allowing someone who is blind in finding their desk and other people’s desk.
Ottawa Via Rail Station
I also used GoodMaps at the Ottawa Via Rail Station. The station is relatively small, which makes it a useful place to test the technology in a transit context but also means it isn’t the most demanding test of what the app can do. That said, the same advantages applied. Being able to find the check-in counter, the washroom, or the lounge on my own rather than waiting for arranged assistance made the experience of travelling through the station noticeably less stressful. It’s less about the size of the station and more about not being deposited in a waiting area and then left there with no options.
If I’m being honest, the venue I really want to see mapped is Toronto Union Station. Union Station is one of the busiest transit hubs in North America with over 300,000 people passing through it daily, and it’s connected to the PATH, which is a 30-plus kilometre underground pedestrian network linking more than 75 buildings and over 1,200 shops and services. The PATH is, according to Guinness World Records, the largest underground shopping complex in the world. For a person who is blind, that’s the kind of environment where indoor navigation would be genuinely transformative, not just convenient. You could arrive at Union Station by train, navigate to your platform or the lounge, then head into the PATH to find a specific restaurant or shop, all without arranging assistance or hoping you find someone to ask. The Ottawa station proves the concept works in a transit context. Union Station is where it would prove it works at scale.
Rideau Centre Mall
The Rideau Centre was the most fun of the Ottawa venues. A mall is a place where you actually want to be able to be flexible, to wander and stop when something interests you, and for a person who is blind that’s normally logistically awkward. With GoodMaps I could be rigid if I wanted one specific store and nothing else, or I could drift and just check what was around me at any given moment. The ability to stop, pull up the list of nearby points of interest, and make an informed choice about whether to detour for a coffee or keep going is the indoor equivalent of glancing around, and I can’t overstate how useful that is when your alternative is wandering and hoping.
What Worked
The core technology works. It placed me accurately, the directions were clear, the points of interest were comprehensive, and across all the venues I used it in, the maps were complete enough to be genuinely useful. The biggest change for me was psychological. I was less stressed, and because I was less stressed I could actually be more flexible in what I did. Independence doesn’t just mean doing things yourself, it means feeling relaxed enough to enjoy doing them.
People who are Sighted have all kinds of visual supports when they are at a location, from signs to visual maps and from information kiosks to color coded route markers. Someone who is blind is excluded from all this information. Goodmaps is part of the puzzle in terms of removing this barrier for someone who is blind.
The feature I keep coming back to is the ability to stop and look around. Stand still, pull up the list of nearby points of interest, and make an informed decision. That’s the indoor equivalent of glancing around, and for a blind person it’s quietly a big deal.
What Hasn’t Worked
My main complaint isn’t really about the app itself, it’s about some of the physical necessities of using it. GoodMaps uses your phone’s camera for positioning, which means you need to hold your phone up in front of you with the camera facing outward. I understand why this is necessary and I don’t see an alternative on a phone. But I find holding my phone out in front of me for an extended walk unnatural and cognitively distracting. I’m splitting my attention between listening to the directions and worrying that I’m about to walk my phone into a door frame, a person, or a glass display case, and the phone is the expensive thing I really don’t want to break.
I also noticed a couple of bad habits in myself. When walking I often want to move my hand, just to follow my usual walking gait and I couldn’t do this while holding the phone out in front of me. Also, when the app tells me to turn, I keep wanting to turn the phone rather than my body, which of course throws off the heading and the accuracy. I assume these issues might go away with regular use.
Also, having to hold the phone doesn’t leave my hand free to touch things while navigating, which might create issues for some. I will say that I could wear my phone on a laniard or put the camera in my pocket with the phone facing outwards but these really aren’t an ideal solution and for me because I’m often wearing a winter jacket half the year the pocket approach doesn’t work and I can’t wear things around my neck for extended periods without feeling pain, so that’s not an option either. This year GoodMaps announced that they will at some future point have smartglass integration and this would remove my biggest complaint by freeing up my hands and aligning with my head and the direction I am facing which to me would be more intuitive. We will have to see if this functionality delivers but I am extremely hopeful.
Also, the Android side had some rough edges. I’ve used GoodMaps on Galaxy S series phones and on a OnePlus 15. These are all flagship android phones. I’m not going to pretend I did a full iOS versus Android comparison, but on my Android devices there were moments where the experience wasn’t as polished as I’d want, and the camera-based positioning occasionally took longer or was less sure of itself than I expected. Useful, but with friction. At work I’ve seen the same with other folk with android devices. I also ran into some issues with my oneplus an d the latest version of the app that I had never seen before around accuracy.
The Social Side
I had two completely opposite reactions to walking around with my phone held up in front of me, and they were entirely driven by where I was. At CSUN, everyone kept trying to help me. Every few minutes someone would offer to guide me, or ask if I was lost, or want to talk about what I was doing or about the app. The irony is that the densest concentration of people who should understand that I was navigating independently kept trying to stop me from navigating independently. Out in the wild at the Ottawa venues, nobody batted an eye. No one offered help, no one stared, no one tried to engage me about it. I much preferred the wild. I suspect the difference was context, but it’s worth knowing that the form factor of holding your phone up in front of your face communicates something to strangers, and at CSUN that something was apparently curiosity or maybe it was that people felt safe to act on their curiosity. On a positive, they had the awareness not to act beyond asking if they can help? Which is a huge positive, because I can’t tell you the number of times that people act without asking to override the agency of people who are blind out in the wild normally. However; in the end having the phone up in front of me was more of an issue for me than it was for others.
Goodmaps is Not a panacea
Goodmaps is part of the puzzle not the only part of what is needed. You still need good travel skills, caning skills or guide dog skills, troubleshooting skills and situational awareness as a person who is blind in order to navigate a venue and Goodmaps is not a replacement for this. Also, GoodMaps is a very very useful solution but also Implementing an accessible environment for someone who is blind requires a multi-tier approach with a mix of low tech, mid tech and high tech solutions. You still need Accessible signage, tactile markers and other low tech fall backs. The whole venue needs to be scanned and not just part of the venue. This point is particularly important in shopping centers and travel destinations like rail and subway stations. For example, at rideau center mall the inside of stores isn’t mapped, so you can get to the entrance of a small store but not get to the front counter of the store. This last few steps leaves you a little in the dark at thend. Could easily be fixed by mapping the kiosks and stores in the mall. There is also no easy way to get assistance if something goes wrong. It would also be relatively easy to fix this by having the app contain the numbers in clickable form for getting help the overall venue and for the destinations in that venue.
Final thoughts Overall
The bottom line is that I feel more empowered, independent and supported at the venues where Goodmaps has been installed. To the point where I signficantly notice the stress levels and difference when visiting venues that don’t have GoodMaps which at this point is most of the places I visit.
I also haven’t talked about the many benefits to people with other types of disabilities and able bodied travellers. There are many benefits to having a solution like this at a venue for these groups too. At some point I may do a part 2 and cover future developments, smartglass integration (when it comes) and maybe the benefits to people other than people who are blind.
On the other hand, the phone is what makes GoodMaps work and it’s also the bottleneck. Everything I don’t love about the experience, the holding, the tendency to turn the phone instead of my body, the social signal it sends, all of it comes from the fact that I’m navigating with a flat rectangle held at chest height. I’m really looking forward to smart glasses integration, because if the camera and positioning move to something I’m wearing and the directions come through audio, I can keep my hands in my pockets and walk naturally. That’s the change that takes this from useful but awkward to just useful,.
In the meantime, GoodMaps on a phone is still a significant net win. It made a conference, a mall, a train station, and an office less stressful and more explorable. It gave me a backup when arranged help evaporated, and it let me do the small ordinary things, find the bathroom, get to the lounge, locate a specific booth, that most people don’t even register as problems. That quiet normalcy is exactly the point.
I’d be interested in other people’s experience with GoodMaps. Please feel free to use the comment section below and let’s learn together.