Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of our most Frequently Asked Questions. If you still haven’t found the answer you’re looking for, get in touch below or contact us here.
Once the app (and maps for the venue and route that you are navigating) has been downloaded, Waymap does not require any external signals. No GPS, no Bluetooth and no mobile signal are required, meaning that Waymap can navigate you anywhere and you are never left without navigation instructions.
Waymap works anywhere where we have the maps. Outdoor, indoor and underground, Waymap has you covered.
Waymap is designed for anyone, anywhere. The app began with the intention of providing a personal navigation app for persons with vision impairment. Since then, our offering has grown significantly. Just like designing the built environment to be accessible for people with disabilities helps everyone without disabilities, our accessible navigation app offers more functionality for everyone else too. Waymap is an app that will allow anyone to go anywhere.
Waymap can guide you anywhere we have deployed our accessible city-wide, integrated transit experience. Waymap enables door to door, step by step, navigation instructions for support throughout the whole journey across buses, trains, tube, trams and on foot.
Waymap has created a breakthrough technology that locates people accurately indoors and outside without signal or beacons, using only a smartphone. Our app uses the sensors already on your phone that measure movement, direction and elevation to navigate via dead-reckoning.
To get technical, the core approach is a particle filter using probability theory and Bayesian statistics, enabling navigation via dead-reckoning. Waymap’s technology is built on extensive ground-breaking work in this area.
Waymap is free for you to use and we want to keep it free. We charge the city, the transport authority and building owners to deploy Waymap, maintain the maps of the venue and update the information for the navigation instructions.
Waymap’s ambition to be available everywhere in every city and to do this we need a partnership with the city government and the transport authorities. If you want Waymap to be available where you live, you can tell your local representatives that you would like them to deploy Waymap. You can also contact us.
We need partnership’s with the building owners to make Waymap available in your school, workplace and community. You can tell them that you would like them to contact Waymap to see how we can make your school, work, neighbourhood and community more accessible.
Waymap takes a privacy first approach to user data that it benchmarked to, and complies with, California’s new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is possible for users to use the App without entering any personal details and by default to not to share information with us. This is because all the computation happens on your phone.
Waymap is designed for accessibility from the ground up. By far the most important driver for our user experience is measured compliance to the standards which the founders have developed through extensive experimentation and trial by the Royal Society for Blind Children (RSBC) and the wider blind and low-vision community. We believe this makes us the world’s leading experts in audio-based navigation for people with vision impairments; but we also believe that ongoing and deep engagement with the local blind and low-vision communities is vital.
We have designed safety into our service from the ground up – specifically to enable our users to continue to use their primary safety aids without hindrance, be that service dog or cane.
And, by helping to set the standards for audio-navigation for blind and low-vision people, we have first-hand knowledge in how to construct and deliver instructions that are clear and unambiguous.
Further, the user testing and standards compliance outlined above provides clear evaluation of the safety of the service prior to launch.
Each time we deploy our services, we work closely with local orientation and mobility experts and stakeholder groups in order to learn more and ensure we continue to deliver the best practice for good and compliant user experience. The conformance checklist for the CTA 2076 standard is available at https://waymapnav.com/media/CTA-2076-compliance-checklist.pdf to download.
For Apple, we support iPhone 7 and above, while for Android we support Samsung (Galaxy 8 and more recent) and Google Pixel (3a and more recent).