(00:00:04.667):
Episode 4, Brandon Biggs, Making Maps Accessible.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:00:10.471):
All right, welcome back to Making Blank Accessible. Maps are
how we navigate our world, orient ourselves in space, and
explore everything from a hospital hallway to a massive
festival ground. Yet for over 30 million online maps, visual-
only designs leave millions of blind, low-vision, and
neurodivergent users completely locked out. Today we are
talking about making maps accessible. Joining me is Brandon
Biggs, CEO and co-founder of XR Navigation, the creators of
Audiom, the world's first digital map platform designed to be
seen, heard, and felt. Brandon is an engineer, a researcher,
and entrepreneur whose work bridges the gap between spatial
data and non-visual interaction. Brandon, welcome to the
Accessibility Show.

Brandon Biggs (00:01:06.834):
Thank you so much. That was a great introduction. I'm excited
to chat.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:01:11.296):
All right. Well, I have kind of a format I follow here, and I
always love to start with the origin story of how you got
started doing the work that you do. So what was that maybe one
moment or experience that made you realize maps needed to be
accessible?

Brandon Biggs (00:01:33.804):
It was really a slow burn, but the one second was when my
advisor in my inclusive design program asked me to make
Napoleon's March of 1812 by Charles Minard accessible. And
this is a classic data visualization that really kicked off
the whole field of data visualization. And so when I looked at
the data for this representation, it was a map. And it had a
bunch of other data on top of that map. Basically, for those
who've never seen it, it has two lines, a really thick line
going from Benyus to Moscow and the line gets a little bit
thinner as it gets to Moscow and then going back from Moscow
it's a fairly thick line that gets to very very small by the
time it gets back to Benyus and this represents the number of
troops that Napoleon had left and so you can contrast quickly
between the amount of troops he left with and the amount of
troops he had coming back and it's very dramatic and along the
way there are battles and each time there's a battle there's
troops that are lost and temperature changes and that also
loses troops and so This had a map that all this data was
overlaid on top of. And so I had to figure out how to make
that accessible. And while I was brainstorming how to do this,
it was a complicated task. And I'd only seen about five maps
in my entire life up to that point as a totally blind person.
And so I was thinking about how to do this, but I was playing
a first-person shooter zombie killer game. And while I was
running around a post-apocalyptic world collecting loot and
killing zombies running through K-marts and warehouses, I
realized that this is a map. And I could just use these exact
same conventions to show the information about the real world
that  And so that's really what inspired the first version of
Audium.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:04:09.980):
I love it.  Going from such a Historical representation, I
love how you described the map. I'm trying to visualize it. I
will try to find that map representation and link it to the
podcast so others can see the representation that you were
talking about. But I love the link to video games. I'm a gamer
myself, and there's all kinds of neat accessibility
advancements happening in the video game field. And I love
that you were able to tie those together. Yeah.

Brandon Biggs (00:04:43.238):
Absolutely. I mean, there's a whole field of audio games,
which are games that are made by and for blind people. And
they've been... Around for a very long time, starting with the
text adventure, multi-user domains or MUDs, and text
adventures in the 80s and continuing up until we had our
first, I guess you could call it first-person experience that
used full-on maps in kind of a live audio experience. It was
called Shades of Doom, and it was really interesting.  It was
groundbreaking for its time, and it really defined the whole
field of audio games. So I grew up in the time when people had
solved all the really hard problems, and so I was very
inspired by those who came before me.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:05:42.389):
For sure.  That actually, that's a great tie-in to kind of
what I wanted to talk about next. We think about website
accessibility. And again, the rules and the people that came
before us that made the web accessible for people like us to
use. But when we think about web accessibility, we think about
things like alt text, we think about screen reader
compatibility. But when it comes to something a little bit
more complex, like a map of an indoor space, an interactive
web map, we talked about weather maps and all the kinds of
maps that exist. What do you think is maybe the thing that
gets overlooked most often when we're trying to think about
map accessibility?

Brandon Biggs (00:06:32.969):
I mean, the entire map gets overlooked when we're talking
about digital accessibility. Usually what happens is people
will make their website fully accessible and then forget about
the map.  Because it's just, it's just, there's a lot there.
Oh, a map is a website in and of itself. So it's such a
complicated widget that it pretty much requires its own
accessibility conformance report. In fact, that's how we, what
we do with Audiom. It has its own accessibility conformance
report and It's just as complicated to evaluate a digital map
component as it is to evaluate the entire website. So it kind
of gives you an idea of the complexity within a single widget
on your website. I basically say you need to treat that map as
its own website, as its own property or entity, however they
want to define it. But it requires, you know, going through
success criterion 1.1.1. All non-text content needs to have a
text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose.  That
doesn't mean alt text unless if it serves the equivalent
purpose. So what does that mean? What is equivalent purpose
when it comes to geographic maps? And so that's just one of
the success criteria. There's 78 of them. And we need to go
through every single one and ask deeply, how can we provide
the equal access to this content when Looking at this success
criteria and making sure that we're hitting the spirit of
accessibility and not just compliance in kind of the most
vague sense. So that's really critical in how do we enable
people who have never been able to view maps before to
actually access this content at a professional level. And
that's the ethos. And I guess some people call it radical
accessibility that extra navigation embodies.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:08:49.845):
I'm not sure it's all that radical to be able to want to
interact with everything on the web. But you bring up a good
point that text itself Is often insufficient to represent a
map, especially a map that changes. I'm thinking of a radar
map for the weather. How do you have sufficient alt text when
it's a live updating map? Yeah.  Yeah, well, it's great. It
was more rhetorical, but no, no,

Brandon Biggs (00:09:25.355):
you can totally have it can actually you can have a text map
that serves the equivalent purpose. And so, yeah, I mean, this
is my PhD dissertation topic, so I can talk forever on this.
But basically, a geographic map, every single geographic map,
regardless of purpose, like regardless of what it's showing
has one purpose.  It communicates generalized spatial
information and relationships. So generalized means that it's
not the real world. It's actually somebody's recreation of the
real world. And they typically do that through points,
polygons, and lines. So every single feature that is on the
visual map must be present on the text map.  The alt text. So
that's like number one. And that's really where I would say
99.99% of the maps fail. And so it's really important that
every single feature is present on the text map. That means
that if you have a map of the United States showing the trade
route goods going between US and Canada, You have every single
state and every single province that is shown on that visual
map in the text map as a base layer because otherwise there's
information that somebody has on that text map as our on the
visual map that is not on the text map and it doesn't serve
the equivalent purpose there. So that's number one. I created
a A tool called the Map Equivalent Purpose Framework that I
published in a journal back in March that basically goes
through a set of questions. And that's the first question. Are
all the features that are present on the visual map present in
the text map?  And we've got a bunch of other questions about
spatial information and spatial relationships. And you asked
basically yes or no questions on does every single feature on
the visual map have the same shape information present on the
text map? Does it have the same orientation information? Size,
thematic information, temporal information, distance,
direction, topological relationships. Are all these, if
they're present on the visual map, present on the text map?
Yes or no? And for something like a dynamically updating map
that you were talking about, the The way that you would do
that is by having some kind of description that is separate
from the alt attribute in an image. And it would be its own
separate page, basically.  And then that would be what you
would update in real time. And that's basically how we handle
it with Audiom. Audiom is its own separate component. And it
uses what we call interactive text to communicate the
information. And that does allow for dynamic updating.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:12:39.901):
Love it. No, that was one of the first things that came to
mind was a dynamically updating map.  And weather maps, I
don't know why I check the weather every morning. With our
conversation earlier, you would ask me, you know, how many
maps do I encounter a day? And I started counting just how
many times something was represented by a map. So there's the
navigation in the van and the weather map and just all of
these Different occurrences. And you're right, for it to be a
truly text equivalent, it needs to have all of that same
information. And that's something It seems difficult to
capture, but also it seems like that's the logical thing to do
if you really truly want the map to be represented and you
don't have a tool to create a map like Audiom. So maybe we'll
talk a little bit about some of the laws and things that come
to mind when we think website accessibility.  I'm thinking
like the Section 508. I'm thinking all across the world,
there's digital accessibility laws and they seem to exclude
maps. Is that that seems like a true statement? And maybe
maybe we can think about why that is.

Brandon Biggs (00:14:18.054):
Yeah. So the Almost all the digital accessibility laws point
to the web content accessibility guidelines. And most of the
laws do not exclude maps. It's just maps have been, people
have been a little bit hesitant to actually make them fully
accessible because it's a lot of work. And I'm actually doing
some research right now with some research assistants,
undergraduate research assistants, where they're describing
maps using long text descriptions. And one of the most common
questions I have is, do I really need to describe X? And the
answer is yes. If it's on the visual map, you must describe
it. That is like the core question number one. Most of the
time people just don't realize how much information is on that
map until they start describing it and they get shocked like
there's a lot here and that needs to be equally usable to
everyone. But there are laws such as the European
Accessibility Act and the public sector's Act in the United
Kingdom that do explicitly exclude thematic maps from needing
to be accessible. They don't exclude navigation maps, but they
definitely exclude thematic maps, which is really unfortunate
because there are over a thousand professions that rely on
thematic maps. These are people like meteorologists, or
epidemiologists, or oceanographers, or climate scientists, or
geologists. I can just keep going on and on and on. All these
professions require the use of thematic maps. And because the
European Accessibility Act and Public Sectors Accessibility
Act in the UK exclude thematic maps, they are also excluding
Disabled people can't use maps from these professions.
Thankfully, the US does not have that exception. So in the US
right now, up for the upcoming ADA Title II regulations, every
state and local government needs to make their digital maps
accessible. Section 508 for federal governments also doesn't
have that exception. They do have an There's an exception for
if it's not technologically possible to do something, then you
don't need to do it. Or if it's an undue burden, you don't
need to do it.  But  some people could have said it's an undue
burden to describe all 26,000 features on this map. But
thankfully now with something like Audiom, it takes 10 minutes
to describe 26,000 features. So there's absolutely no excuse
for them to think that that's an undue burden now.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:17:17.363):
Love it. Something else that came to mind for me when we're
talking about some of the technology available, I'm thinking
about I met a gentleman, a blind gentleman once at a
conference and he was using a spatial, like he talked to his
phone and the phone was able to recognize what was around him
and he was kind of walking around with his phone in his hand.
Can you maybe give us a baseline? What's the difference
between an app that does something like that and what your app
is doing instead?

Brandon Biggs (00:18:01.131):
There are two parts to navigation, orientation and mobility.
Orientation is the Understanding of space before you actually
go through that space. And it's typically done as a pre-trip
planning piece or it helps you build gestalt or like an
overall understanding of a space so that it's harder for you
to get lost. You understand at a high level where you are in
space at any point in time. Mobility is getting you from point
A to point B and is telling you what's happening and what's
around you as you're moving through space in real time. Audiom
is just an orientation tool. We just got a grant to integrate
with mobility tools, but it is...  Pretty much the only
digital orientation tool for blind people. There are a few
apps that kind of sort of try and do this,  but it is
definitely one of the more advanced tools out there for doing
any kind of pre-trip planning or orientation to a space. So
for example, I went to a location that I'd never been to
before a couple of days ago and I used Audiom to build a
mental map in my head  when I get out of the subway station,
where do I need to turn to get to my location? Is it left or
right? How many blocks do I need to go? Which side of the
street is my destination on? These are questions that are
really important for people to know, especially if you can't
see signage.  And so I was able to build this mental map in my
head. And even though the exit I ended up going out of was a
different exit than I had planned, I knew exactly where I was
because I had viewed the map. And I could understand from an
overarching perspective, oh, I am on this block, which is a
block down, and the other side of the street from where I
thought I was going to get off at.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:20:21.583):
OK. Yeah.

Brandon Biggs (00:20:23.688):
That's not something that a blind person normally is able to
do, especially if they're relying completely on mobility apps.
If you get lost or take a wrong turn that's out of your
understanding of getting from point A to point B and you don't
have a map, an overall understanding of the space, you are
lost.  And so that's the power of orientation. That's the
power of maps. And so that's really the whole goal of why we
should use a map for navigation.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:21:00.416):
I love it. That very clearly illustrated for me the difference
between what you would call a mobility app and an orientation
app and how they could and should work together. Yes.  Yeah.
So maybe walk us through what your method is. Let's say I am a
conference planner and I have an event space and I know that I
have visual maps in my brochure. I want to make sure it's
accessible. What is the first step that I need to do in
getting that information to you and helping me create an
accessible map?

Brandon Biggs (00:21:42.419):
Yeah, you send me an email with the floor plans. Yep, that's
the first step. So typically, the first step, just in general,
is the data needs to be turned into a computer readable
format, which is called vectorization. And PDFs,
unfortunately, are not usually vectorized. So that's the first
step. For this particular case, it's a first step. If you are
state and local government and you have a team that vectorizes
data, then you don't need this first step. But if you're a
conference planner, you don't usually have that team. So you
email us the map and we will give you a quote for the entire
conference map and you say yes or no. If you say yes, then we
will go ahead and vectorize that map and give you back two
different links.  One link that It goes to our website with a
map on it. So it's at xrnavigation.io slash nfb25 is the
National Federation of the Blind 2025 map that we did for
them. Okay. And it will also give you an iframe that you can
embed into your existing apps or websites that basically
allows users to have the live map on Right there on the page.
So rather than clicking to another website, it's just right
there on your page. And that's what we recommend because it
drives at least 5x, five times the amount of people to view
the map as it does if they're just clicking to another
website. So strongly recommend embedding it. We give you the
option to do both. So that's it.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:23:25.539):
That's so easy. The event planner in me wants to definitely
make some accessible spaces. You kind of mentioned you've got
a five times rate there on engagement with the iFrame over the
separate website. How else are you measuring, like, what's
your success criteria once you've created an accessible map
for someone? Do you get feedback? Do you do user testing? Do
you make updates? What does success look like?

Brandon Biggs (00:24:00.012):
For clients, we are measuring the usage rate and oftentimes
what we'll do is, depends on the map, but we will do a video
usually of a blind user accessing that data and Providing, you
know, here's how you kind of, you know, here's how I can
understand where the elevators are and here's where the main
entrance is, you know, and here's how I can get between those
two. And so we often will provide a video demo of somebody
using a blind person using that map to access the spatial
information. And we'll put that also next to the live map as
well. But this is kind of a validation that, yeah, this works.
Like before it was blank and now you can actually access that
spatial information. Outside of our client engagements, and if
the client wants to do more pilot testing, we can absolutely
support that. But typically, we will send them a video of a
blind person using the map so they can understand what it is
and how the experience is.  Then any additional testing
they'll need to do, but we'll support them on. But outside of
client maps, we have grants that support research that's above
and beyond a client map. So for example, Right now we're
running a study where we're actually having sighted
participants answer spatial questions on a visual map and then
answer spatial questions on our interactive text map without
visuals. And they have to answer the same types of questions
on both maps and we're evaluating if There's any difference
between those two in accuracy and on cognitive load. And our
goal is really to see if we can get Audiom in the interactive
text experience to be the same accuracy as the visual map. And
so we've got it to the stage to where they are answering the
same questions. There's just a few little pieces like hearing
shapes, for example, needs to be optimized a little bit more
with audio. You can hear them. It just takes some time to
understand. And we're really trying to just cream visual maps
because Sighted people have had lots of training on visual
maps and they've never used an audio map before. And we're
expecting them to have the same performance on an audio map
after viewing and learning what an audio map is for the first
time 10 minutes before. And we expect them within 30 minutes
to be the same proficiency as they are with a visual map that
they've viewed their entire life. So we have a really high bar
for...  Audio maps. And so we're really trying to make our
interactive text maps or audio maps much, much better than
visual maps. But at the end of the day, it will show
equivalency between the two.  So that's really one of the
tests that we're running right now. And so we've run 40
participants so far on this, and we're getting ready to
publish those results. And then we're running different
experiments to test different components of the audio map to
optimize for different pieces, like hearing shapes, for
example.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:27:40.882):
Great.  I love it. I love that you're publishing so much of
your research. And if I don't already have the links to some
of your papers, I know I have the one you mentioned earlier.
And if you know where your next one is going to be published,
I'll keep things updated.

Brandon Biggs (00:27:57.938):
Google Scholar Profile is going to be your best friend or my
CV from my website.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:28:02.781):
Love it. All right. I will make sure that those are linked in
the podcast as well.  I wanted to ask, you mentioned making
videos of people using the software. Is there a live demo of
the software if my listeners would like to experience it?

Brandon Biggs (00:28:23.247):
Absolutely. There's many, many live demos. So you can go to
xrnavigation.io and the very first element once you get into
the main body of the page is a tutorial, an interactive
tutorial. You can also go to our gallery, which is in the
sidebar. You can click on gallery and there's a bunch of
different examples there. And so that's really where I would
recommend people go to try out Audiom.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:28:52.968):
For sure. I'll make sure everything is linked.

Brandon Biggs (00:28:56.932):
Awesome. And if you're blind yourself and you want to use it
for trip planning or something like that, go ahead and click
on the Audiom for Personal Use and that'll bring you to the
website where you can enter in your own address and whatnot.
And if you are a blind person wanting to go into the earth
sciences or a profession that requires the use of maps, please
reach out.  We need to work together and  I'm looking for
blind people to bring onto our project who are  So that's a
call out to folks. And if you're blind and you have a map that
you want made accessible, please email it to us and we will do
our best to make it accessible for you.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:29:45.024):
I'd love that.  There are several blind people in my network.
I'm not sure all of them listen to the podcast, but I will
amplify that ask for sure. I want to help you with your
research and the projects that you're working on. I'll try to
make a few connections for you and get some more users for
Audiom.

Brandon Biggs (00:30:08.919):
Yeah, that'd be great.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:30:11.341):
All right.  As we wrap it up here, I always try to end with
the, what's the one action? So for someone listening to the
podcast, maybe not the event planner who has already emailed
you their maps and is talking vectorization, but for, you
know, Perhaps an accessibility specialist, a learning
designer, someone else just listening out of interest. What is
the single most important thing that they can do to start
making map information more accessible in their current
projects?

Brandon Biggs (00:30:50.500):
They need to bring up the need for accessibility in their team
because most people have never really thought about it and
they need to ask or go look at one of my webinars that I've
done for places like  the National States  Geographic
Information Council or the ADA centers, National ADA centers
and really understand That it is possible to hear and use your
maps in an accessible way. So that's number one. And if
selling to management is a problem, you can look at two
different return on investment areas. First is around 20% of
your population is unable to use a geographic map.  And these
are the people that you really need using geographic maps. So,
for example, I was recently at a city where the Public Transit
Authority published a complete bus route redesign and asked
for public feedback. And they sent out a survey, and the very
first element on that survey was a map. And it was completely
blank.  And every single question on that survey required the
use of this blank map. So despite being someone who's
completely reliant on public transit, I can't drive, I'm
totally blind, I must use public transit to get to work, I
must use it to get to school, go get groceries, anything.
Despite being someone who's completely reliant on public
transit, I wasn't able to let my voice be heard on this
complete bus route redesign. I didn't even know if my bus
route was still going to be there after this redesign.  So  as
an entity that is interested in hearing from their citizens,
you want to hear from people like me who are extreme users Of
your services.

(00:33:05.989):
Absolutely.

Brandon Biggs (00:33:06.489):
And because the maps aren't accessible, I'm not able to give
feedback on bus route redesigns, infrastructure, buildings
that are potentially going up for civic engagement, you know,
projects, election result maps, any of these maps that are
being published, even, you know, park maps, to be honest.  And
these are not And I would be someone who would be very heavily
using these maps. So that's number one. You are going to
engage 20% of your population and that's the 20% that is going
to be the most heavy users of your public services and who
really care about your public services. The second piece is
financial.  Digital accessibility lawsuits Can reach around
$350,000 a piece. Demand letters are around $25,000. The
digital accessibility lawsuits have reached in the past $6
million. So like these are a lot of money and it's nowhere
near as expensive to make your map accessible, all your maps
accessible. So financially speaking, From a risk perspective,
it's way, way cheaper to make your maps accessible than it is
Get sued for not being accessible. So that's another piece. So
those are two action items that you can bring to your state
and local government management to start justifying why
digital accessibility is so important. You can also, very
easy, update every single one of your contracts with your
vendors to require that they will indemnify digital
accessibility. And you then shift the onus of this upcoming
ADA Title II regulation to the private entity that's providing
you those maps. And that way you don't need to worry as much.
You still need to worry about it. But part of the
responsibility then gets shifted onto the private vendor and
they will be more Interested in working with you if they are
also at risk. So that's a very easy fix, relatively speaking.
Just start adding indemnification clauses into your packs and
that'll be a really quick win to start helping make your maps
accessible. And if the vendor doesn't know how to make their
maps accessible, reach out to me. Heather, reach out to me and
we will talk about it.

Britne Jenke, CPACC (00:35:54.585):
Oh, that's perfect. I love that, that shifting the
responsibility to the vendors. I know in the spaces I've
worked, a lot of platforms and things shift it the other way,
rely on users to make their product accessible without You
know, starting with accessibility in mind. So I'm glad to see
that shift. I'm glad to see that there are ways to hold some
of these vendors accountable for what they are creating and
make sure that their creations as well as ours that we create
with our vendor tools are as accessible as they can be.  I
think that was the end of my questions. We've got three action
items for our listeners. Let's take it higher up in
management. Let's get teams focused on accessibility. Let's
avoid those financial risks. And let's ask our vendors to do
their best as well. So a huge, huge heartfelt thank you once
again, Brandon, for joining us and making maps accessible. So
Brandon's work proves that when we design for all senses, we
create richer, more intuitive experiences for everyone. If
this episode has helped you see or hear maps in a brand new
way, please take a moment right now to support the
Accessibility Show. Hit follow or subscribe in your podcast
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doing and ensures you never miss an episode where we fill in
the blank. As always, I will have a full time-stamped
accessible transcript of the conversation along with all of
those links to Brandon's research, the audium demos, and we'll
have all of that on our website at accessibility show dot com.
That's A11yShow.com.  Thank you all for tuning in to Making
Blank Accessible. We'll be back soon to discuss making another
part of our world accessible. Until then, keep exploring and
keep building a more inclusive world.

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