Why Accessible Geographic Data Matters For Everyone

Maps shouldn’t say “graphic, clickable, blank” when what we really need is orientation. We sit down with Brandon Biggs, CEO of XR Navigation, to unpack why traditional map interfaces exclude blind, low-vision, and neurodiverse users—and how cross-sensory design transforms static visuals into reliable spatial understanding. Brandon makes a clear case that maps are not just about mobility; they’re about building mental models of names, distances, directions, shapes, and relationships. Without accessible orientation tools, people lose access to critical public data and even entire careers that rely on geographic information.

We dive into the promises and pitfalls of AI for mapping. Street imagery descriptions are improving, but 70% accuracy is not enough when a misread road or building can derail someone’s route and safety. Audium offers an alternative grounded in authoritative data: a visual mode with readable contrast and scalable interfaces, and a nonvisual mode that feels like a game, using spatial audio and sound textures to convey features without adding cognitive overload. Every element remains text-exposed for screen readers and Braille, ensuring WCAG compliance and human verification. It’s not AI versus accessibility—it’s AI partnered with verifiable, inclusive design.

Policy and practice are shifting. ADA Title II rules in the US begin to mandate accessible geographic maps for state and local agencies, while Europe and the UK still exclude many maps unless used for navigation, unintentionally limiting access to fields like epidemiology, planning, and environmental science. Brandon explains how Audium’s Esri partnership enables agencies to convert entire map libraries in Experience Builder, drawing on ArcGIS Living Atlas, OpenStreetMap, and local datasets. From wildfire layers to zoning overlays and event wayfinding, this is a blueprint for making public spatial data usable by everyone.

If accessible orientation resonates with you, join us: subscribe, share this conversation with a colleague in government or GIS, and leave a review with one change you want to see in public maps. Your feedback helps push inclusive mapping from a nice-to-have to a new standard.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Brandon Biggs And Audium
• 1:29 Maps As Orientation Not Mobility
• 3:01 Language Gaps And Nonvisual Diagrams
• 5:15 Regulations: US Momentum, EU Exceptions
• 7:05 AI Limits And The 70 Percent Problem
• 10:20 Human Verification And Safety
• 12:18 Synthetic Data Vs Labeled Spatial Data
• 13:30 How Audium Works: Visual And Audio Modes
• 15:53 Data Sources, Partnerships, And Scale
• 18:07 Browser Delivery, Offline Limits, Use Cases
• 20:06 Wayfinding Use And Event Maps
• 24:36 Thanks, Sponsors, And Closing

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. It's 2026, people. My goodness, it smack up on us. And I'm delighted that we're joined today by Brandon Biggs. Brandon is the uh is an entrepreneur, researcher, inclusive designer, and lifelong learner. He's also the CEO of XR Navigation. So welcome, Brandon. That's a lot of stuff that you're doing. So can you tell us a little bit more about what the work is that you're doing at XR Navigation?

Brandon Biggs: 0:33

Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. So my work focuses around making geographic information usable to everyone. So that's what both my PhD research is on, and then also what my company is completely focused on as well.

Neil Milliken: 0:49

Excellent. Navigation is tricky for some. Has been for me, as dyslexic that doesn't understand left and right. I've been blessed by technology tools that have helped me navigate, right? But I know it's more than just about navigation. Maps hold essential information about all kinds of things. So tell me more about what you mean when you say giving everybody access, because maps are very visual tools, but they're also there's more to it than just the visual elements of maps. There's all sorts of different bits to unpack there.

Brandon Biggs: 1:28

Absolutely. So just kind of right off the bat, most work in navigation, accessible navigation technology is around mobility. Maps are not related to mobility. They are related to orientation. So we have specialists who teach blind people how to navigate the world called orientation and mobility specialists. And orientation tools are really sparse. There's very, very few out there. And maps are one of those, probably the only orientation tool that's out there. And right now, if you're blind and you go onto a website that has a geographic map, say like a Google map or an Apple map or you know a Bing map of some kind, you're gonna hear map region, graphic clickable, blank. That's it. So you don't hear any spatial information whatsoever. And these maps communicate all different kinds of information. And I can speak on this for a really long time, but in brief, a map communicates generalized spatial information and relationships. And these include things such as the name, the type, distance, direction, shape, size, orientation, and topological relationships of all the points, polygons, and lines. So that's a technical definition there. But basically, if you break each one of those down, a geographic map needs to communicate all that information. If it doesn't, it's not considered a geographic map.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 3:01

So in your journey of making maps accessible, have you faced any restrictions in making happen across different geographies?

Brandon Biggs: 3:14

The most challenging aspect around different geographies is, of course, the the linguistic gap. And we've definitely faced some challenges around the fact that mini-maps are not translated from a map level. So for example, we did add multilingual support to Audium, which is our map viewer, earlier last year. That doesn't mean that the maps themselves have been translated. And so, in order to actually translate, say, for example, like Fillmore Street into, you know, via Fillmore, if you're Italian, then you need to actually have somebody manually go in and translate all the different labels. So what we've the difficulty that we've had is that, you know, say for example our our interactive tutorial has English labels but on the objects, but the you know tutorial itself might be in in Japanese or or some other language, and so the map itself has not is not translated in particular. But as it relates to geographies, thankfully, we have you know latitude and longitude, and that's very universal no matter where you're at in the world. Now, when you get out of the planet Earth to the moon or to Mars or even into the cellular level, then latitude and longitude start breaking down. And so that's also been some interesting challenges that we've had to deal with. So, for example, we've made a skeleton, a human skeleton diagram that has, you know, all 230-something odd bones in the human body. And if you tried to make a tactile diagram of that exact same information, it would be the size of a human or even bigger, because in order to have Braille labels, you need to have a bigger space. So it would be massive. And most people just don't have space in their house for something like that. Whereas all you need to do with audio is visit a web page and you know that doesn't take up any space.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 5:15

And in terms of regulation, are there countries who are more friendly for you to implement and favor the need for such maps?

Brandon Biggs: 5:25

Yes, absolutely. So in this particular instance, oddly enough, North America, both the US and Canada, are the most friendly for requiring geographic map accessibility. So the ADA Title II regulations, for example, are going into effect April 2026 here in the U.S. And they explicitly require that all state and local government agencies in the US have accessible geographic maps. Europe, on the other hand, both Europe and the UK have explicit exceptions for geographic maps. They say that geographic information doesn't need to be accessible unless if it's used for navigational purposes. So what this does, in effect, is ban the ability for disabled people to participate in over a thousand professions, such as epidemiology, oceanography, meteorology, and you know, any of these other professions that require the use of geographic information or even spatial information, just because they don't need to make it accessible because of that one exception.

Debra Ruh: 6:34

Brandon, can we, being somebody that's neurodiverse myself, and I know Neil is as well, one thing that I've noticed, and I'm sure my age has nothing to do with it, but actually my orientation seems to be getting worse as I get older. And I think part of it is also just because the world is pretty intense, right? I mean, just to be fair, the world is so intense right now. Just I was listening to AI this morning. I was talking to AI about something, and we have a 54% increase in layoffs right now. So it's like I really do understand some of my orientation issues are because of stress. But I think it's so interesting because I know that I've seen I've heard a lot, I've heard not a lot, but I've heard different leaders over the year trying to make maps fully accessible. And I even said to you before we came on air, because you and I have known each other for a while. And thank you for being one of my global advisors, because I really love the work that y'all do. I really do. But the the spatial information, the no spatial information, that is what really, really impacts not just people in wheelchairs or people that are blind, but people like me, neurodiverse people. That is killing us. And like Neil said, oh yeah, thank goodness I had some of these, and he's right. But it just feels like this is such an important time to be doing this. And I'm glad that Antonio brought up the fact that that Europe and the UK have put this exception in place, which is unfortunate. And they are so proactive with inclusion. I'm hoping they will change their mind on that exception so that they don't prevent us from getting access to the information we need. But I'm just fascinated with the way you're looking at these things, because I know when we were trying to make maps accessible early on, I mean, I've been in this field since 2000. You know, we were trying and it was so hard, Brandon. It was really hard. And like you said, we don't get all the data. We don't get the, I'm looking down at my notes, the spatial data. We get the mobility, and we've looked at it for mobility, and it helps, but the orientation is a really big part of it. And I don't see anyone else, I don't see people addressing it, but it must be being addressed in AI and robotics. It must be. Anyway, so over to you to explain this to me.

Brandon Biggs: 8:53

Yeah, so like like you were saying, there has been some work around, you know, for using allowing people to access spatial information using AI. But again, that kind of goes back to the mobility piece. So for example, I'm here on the Georgia Tech campus, and we've got these little robots, the delivery robots that go around campus delivering food to people. There's, you know, hundreds of these little robots going around our campus at any point in time. And they're using the geographic data that we use, but they're using it for navigation purposes. So you know that mobility piece. So they're not really using it in a map per se, but the you know, the delivery apps and everything all have geographic maps on them so that I can tell where my robots are at. And that information is not usable to me right now. On the other hand, Google and Apple have been working to make street view imagery accessible using AI descriptions. And this has been a really promising area of research. The issue is that they're about 70% accurate. And the problem is that if your map is about 70% accurate, that's three miles out of a 10-mile trip. So if you're okay being three miles off when you reach your destination, then 70% is fine. But otherwise, I'm I'm definitely not okay with 70% accuracy when it comes to a map. So that's why we need something like Audium, which is 100% accurate all the time based off the data. So that's that's kind of the big difference here. And Audium allows a human to be in the loop to verify any AI responses on these technologies that something like Google or Apple have been developing. And I think Microsoft is also maybe working on something like this as well.

Neil Milliken: 10:46

But I I can I dig into that a bit more, right? So I mean I I play around with maps. I'm a visual person, right? And like I I I like to look at my maps and particularly like street view data and satellite data because I like to s explore areas and and look for things and see about things that I can, you know, that that I maybe wouldn't sort of come across other than by sort of crawling through the map. Now, when you say you might be three miles off, I mean the way that so I'm I'm trying to grasp how that would work because Street View, my my sort of thinking around Street View is you wouldn't be miles off because if you were latitude and longitudinal geolocation, but you might misidentify something if you were if you were looking at it and the description was wrong. So can you explain why you said you might yeah, it's gonna tell you there's roads there that aren't actually there. It might tell you that there is a building there that's not actually there, or vice versa. And so these are some of the errors that the AI has been providing. And when you're a blind person navigating a space, you really need everything to be as precise as possible because otherwise you're not gonna know what uh like you're you're gonna get just lost if something is just a little bit off from what you're expecting. Sure. Especially if you're looking for a road and they made up a road that's not there, you are gonna be super lost. Yeah. So I I wasn't aware that they're making out roads. Now I can see how it, you know. I've I've I've just spent some time in in Sardinia, which is a little Italian, not little, it's a large Italian island in the Mediterranean where there's some fairly small roads, and some of them are more tracks than roads. And so yeah, I yeah, what what the map tells you is a road might not be that much of a road, and I can see how those kind of things can be even more problematic if you can't see and get that visual information.

Brandon Biggs: 12:48

Well these these tests were done in a city in or an urban US environment, and so if they have a problem in New York, they're gonna really have a problem in Sardinia.

Neil Milliken: 12:57

Yeah, I can I can imagine that. I can also imagine that if you're trying to identify a particular building or, you know, that you need to be in and it misdescribes that, that's going to be problematic. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And yeah. And I can imagine it's also a safety issue.

Brandon Biggs: 13:15

Yeah, absolutely. And even if you go onto Anthropic's webpage or Gemini's page on their limitations section, every single AI will say, you need to human verify what this AI is telling you. Do not trust it, because it will make up stuff. Every single AI has that disclaimer under it. And right now, if a blind person's given some kind of Street View AI description, there is absolutely no way for them to verify that. Zero. And so they are trusting on that completely, but yeah, they're the ones who don't have any access to, say, for example, signage that might help them get on track when they're moving through a space. So, you know, orienting to an incorrect with incorrect information is going to be super detrimental to a blind person. So I almost think that it shouldn't be available if, you know, there's no way for a human to verify what that AI is telling you, because it's going to be really confusing.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 14:17

So at the opening of CES, the CEO of Nvidia was mentioning about some developments on physical AI and that synthetic data will play a major role in turning models. How do you see the role of synthetic data here in order you to improve what you're doing?

Brandon Biggs: 14:36

I am not sure synthetic data is gonna be super helpful in this particular sense. Our problem is not that we don't have the data, it's the problem the problem is that we don't have correctly enough correctly labeled data. And also the focus has just not been on spatial AI yet. And so like that's also been been a problem. And you know, companies like Ezri have been doing some work on this, but it's, you know, they still need to catch up. So I think there's gonna be, at some point, there's gonna be more focus and and we're gonna get more accurate information. But when I ask Ezri if AI is threatening to get rid of their visual map viewer, they just laugh at me and say, absolutely not. We still need our visual map viewer. AI is not gonna replace our our visual maps. That's the the kind of approach that I've been taking with Audium. Audium is that sensory interface that can be partnered with AI. And so it's gonna help you access information, but it's not gonna be the end-all, be all. It's not the silver bullet that people want, you know, to just solve the problem.

Debra Ruh: 15:45

Brandon, will will you tell us what the what your app does? Because I knew you were talking about it before we went on air and it was pretty impressive.

Brandon Biggs: 15:53

Yeah, so the visual version of Audium allows you to zoom in up to 200% without squashing interface elements, adjust the border width of features to make them easier to see, switch between using patterns or colors if you're colorblind. You can click on different features to have them read out to you in speech, and you can really adjust the interface to be how you want it to be. The non-visual version of Audium is like a video game where users hear the name and sound of objects as they move a character around the map, a user-specified distance using their arrow keys, touchscreen, or other controller. So, for example, they can move over Fillmore Street and they'll hear, you know, Fillmore Street, and then they'll also hear a concrete footstep that's representative of Fillmore Street. And then you can also turn on uh optionally, you can turn on surround sounds, which are similar to if you're the blinded IP player and mark a polo and you've turned towards the different people shouting polo and you run towards them, it's using this idea called spatial audio to position sounds around the user so that you can you can go and and navigate towards them. It's kind of like signage basically. And so we use these different techniques as the user is moving around the environment in the video game like interface to let them know what's around and to help reduce the cognitive load so they're not just reading everything in text. Although, if they want and they have a braille display, they can read everything in text because we make sure that everything is available in text, so it's WACAG compliant.

Neil Milliken: 17:29

Deborah, you're muted. I know you were asking a question.

Debra Ruh: 17:33

Good thing I was muted. My flute just fell on the ground. Anyway, in the case though, so it's all right. Just to I have a just a couple of things that are coming in my mind. It seems like you've got to get a lot of data to make it work, though, like you're using Fillmore Street. So I'd be curious how are you going to gather that data? I'm very curious about that. I'm also curious how many users are using it? And do you find the people that are using it are mainly people with lived experiences with disabilities? And I mean, it just feels like the work you're doing is so important. And I hope that, you know, some of our audience will realize that and realize that it would be really powerful for, you know, them to get involved with you. But I was just curious about those things, and I'll hand it over to Antonio.

Brandon Biggs: 18:17

We we have a very nice benefit in this industry in that the data is there. We've got lots and lots of data. In fact, every state and local government agency that has geographic maps usually has a department, like people who are specifically employed to maintain and create maps of their data. Think things like utility line information, building zoning, or wildfire information. And all this is data that is available that we can add onto our maps. And tools like ArcGIS from ESRI, they make all their data freely available through their living atlas tool. And OpenStreetMap also has data that we access. Any state and local government agency, most of them make their data freely available. But so our clients are the state and local government agencies that need to make their map data accessible. Even though it is freely available, they do have viewers on their website, usually ArcGIS viewers that are not accessible out of the box. And so Audium, we are an official ESRI partner, and we've got an experience builder plugin that the user, the state and local government agency just needs to install in their organization, and they can make all 200 of their you know maps that they have available accessible fairly quickly. And so that's that's kind of one of the questions that you answered. So data is there. We just need to hook audio to that data. Uh the second uh question is how many users do we have? Last year we had about 25,000 users using our maps, and we don't actually Know the type of disability or you know lived experience that these people have. All we can say is that 25,000 people use our maps and 20% of the population has a disability. So that's that's the only way that we can figure that out because anybody can use any type, any aspect of our interface. So even if we were tracking how many people use the audio version or how many people use Texas Speech or how many people use the zooming in functionality, we don't actually know because you, as a cited person, could totally use the audio interface to access the information. So uh it doesn't really give us a ton of data if we track that. But I can definitely tell you we had about 20,000, 25,000 users last year. That was up from 2,000 the year before. So hopefully this year we'll 10x that as well.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 20:47

So uh two questions from from a perspective of a user. How do people can experience do they need to use an app? Can they do it in the browser? And then how do you mitigate the fact that networks are not perfect and people sometimes might lose network access on the MOOC?

Brandon Biggs: 21:07

Yeah, so Audium is a browser app and it primarily is embedded into government agency websites. So think your local fire, your fire, wildfire management agency, or your parks department, or your city planning department. So these are the places where you would find Audium. It's not really a consumer app. We do have a consumer website. If people want to try it out, you can go to audiomaudiom.net and we've got an interactive demo there, we've got our, you know, some information there, but it is really a business to business, business to government app that they can install to make their site maps accessible. And we support the same functionality that ArcGIS, um, which is what they're currently using, supports. So if you have a bad network connection, ArcGIS is not going to work very well. And Audium also won't work very well unless if you've downloaded that data previously. And then if you're using Audium and you've downloaded the data to your system, then it will allow you to move around. But um, it's kind of a limitation of many browser technologies that you know the maps themselves are really massive data sets and you can only download a few kilometers of the data at once, as otherwise there's just way, way too much data there. So the maps that we're talking about have, you know, uh 3,000 to 20,000 features on them within a good square kilometer of you know uh a space. So there's a lot, these are gigabytes of of data. They they become really massive really quickly. So at the moment, the best way to experience audium, if you want to experience right now, is to visit our website, either audium.net for personal use or xrnavigation.io for commercial use and click on our gallery page, and there's a bunch of different maps there that you can try out. Or if you have a map because you're a state and local government agency, or you have maps that you provide to your clients, uh, that's what we can make accessible with audium. So we just take the exact same data that's already being shown visually to the user and put that into a cross-sensory experience.

Neil Milliken: 23:24

Yeah. I I finished to find my home already. I just had a sort of a squeeze around and and so on on audium.net. So and I and I see that you can download the map. So so uh kind of answer a ton of the questions. But again, this as you say, this is not so much for wayfinding, but for actually using the maps whilst you're you know, whilst you're interacting with other products and services, because that's the thing. Most most most of the the use of maps on government websites is for information and not for wayfinding. Exactly. Yeah.

Brandon Biggs: 24:00

And it can be used for wayfinding. So for example, we did you know the National Federation of the Blind Conference this last year, and we're gonna be the official map provider for CSUN this year. And so we we do have wayfinding maps, but wayfinding is just a small part of what maps are used for.

Speaker 3: 24:16

Yeah. No that that's clear. Thank you so much for for coming on, sharing what you're doing. It's it's fascinating work, and and you're really dealing with a lot of complex topics there. I I'd love to see how this develops. So we'll probably be back in touch in a while. But I also need to thank our friends at Amazon for sponsoring us and keeping us on air. And thank everyone for listening for the last 11 plus years to AXSChat. So if you like this, you fear this, make sure that you subscribe. So it keeps us going. So thank you very much, Brandon. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today and your guest number one for 2026. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.