senTOUR - Easy Access to the National Park

The elderly are an important target group for tourism and recreation. The elderly are confronted with age-related deficits as regards vision/sight, mobility and orientation and thus require services that respect and meet their needs.

The aim of the project is to provide elderly people with specially designed on-site tourism information via a senior-friendly webbased information portal for the Gesäuse National Park. The main component is an interactive map that is processed in an accessible and senior-friendly way and can be accessed via a mobile application.

National Park Maps with Semantic Text-to-Speech Output

Information which is needed for a visit to the National Park and on-site orientation is made accessible by providing information addressing at least two senses simultaneously. Therefore, emphasis was placed on a senior-friendly layout of the graphic user interface and map (larger font, large symbols, etc.) as well as supporting non-visual access to information. The contents of the information portal can also be heard via the innovative semantic text-to-speech output of the National Park map (“talking map”).

Indoor and Outdoor Navigation

The combination of web portal (desktop version) and app for mobile devices allows for universal operation of senTOUR from trip planning at home to on-site navigation. During navigation users have many possible ways to have their surroundings described and can make use of senior-friendly functions like tour selection according to preassigned criteria of personal impairment, search for the nearest resting place or help/ emergency call.

The end users were involved not only in testing the desktop version (some twenty test subjects), but also directly on site (around fifteen test subjects). In this way, the project team was able to assess the disabilities of potential end users more accurately and use the results for app design. The project resulted in many new findings regarding senior-friendly, accessible map design.

The main focus is easy, intuitive usability, and information output has to be designed in a way that it can be easily understood by people with different kinds of impairment.

Consortium Manager

AccessibleMap Association

Further Project Partners

• CEIT Research Network
• Nationalpark Gesäuse GmbH
• ÖAR
• Paris Lodron University of Salzburg
• Positec Technologie Entwicklungs GmbH

Project Coordinator

DI Wolfgang Wasserburger
E-Mail: wolfgang@wasserburger.at