Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have been drawing increasing interest over the past years. For blind and partially sighted persons, they open up fantastic independent mobility possibilities... as long as such vehicles are accessible to them.
From June 2019 to November 2022, the PAsCAL project has assessed the level of social acceptance of CAVs by the population, including visually impaired persons. EBU worked together with universities, mobility companies and an organisation of drivers from 7 countries, to collect blind and partially sighted persons’ expectations though surveys, focus groups and on-site tests.
In March 2022, we presented the second survey report, gathering responses from more than 1000 blind and partially sighted persons across Europe, as well as a free online comparative tool to extract statistics per country.
The PAsCAL consortium is now proud to launch the Guide2Autonomy, an online toolbox with more than 100 technical, political, legal and economic recommendations for the industry, public authorities and user representative organisations. It is expected to help accelerate a user-friendly evolution of CAVs and transport systems at an international, national and local level.
EBU’s contribution would not have been possible without the strong involvement of our members and our technical adviser on the project, Erwin DENNINGHAUS. Thank you all for this collective success!
The PAsCAL project was co-funded by the Horizon Europe programme of the European Union. For more information on PAsCAL, please visit https://www.euroblind.org/connected-and-autonomous-vehicles.