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The purpose of this paper is to create a building rating system (BRS) with its bottom-up design model that can be carried out manually and in the future automatically.

The BRS is built on the basis of the structure of spatial representation framework for indoor navigation by people with visual impairment, which was validated with visually impaired people, and incorporated with building design standards and regulations from around the world. The BRS was afterwards validated by three groups of five experts in the related fields such as research and development, accessibility, and building and interior designs. Finally, the user evaluation was carried out by three focus groups of three experts in risk assessment to verify the usability of the system.

This paper provides the design and methodology of the BRS used for classifying the accessibility in buildings into four levels of classification for people with visual impairment navigating around the buildings. This system is evaluated with system usability scales (SUS), which is found to be in a “Good” level on average (72.2 SUS scores).

Success criteria used in the space classification are mainly created for people with visual impairment at this stage; other disabilities requirements must be taken into account for the next stage of the development.

The system can be carried out in the future automatically in the form of standalone software or plugins that can be integrated in buildings and interior design software to seek recommendations toward a creation of inclusive built environment.

This paper presents a design architecture of BRS with its details, description and success criteria used in the space classification.

The purpose of this paper is to validate a framework for spatial representation, aka the spatial representation framework (SRF), to define spaces and building information required by people with visual impairment as a foundation of indoor maps for indoor navigation systems.

The SRF was first created with seven main components by a review of the relevant literature and state-of-the-art technologies shown in the preliminary study. This research comprised of two tasks: investigating problems and behaviors while accessing spaces and buildings by visually impaired people (VIP) and validating the SRF where 45 participants were recruited (30 VIP and 15 experts).

The findings revealed a list of problems and challenges were used to validate and redefine the spatial representation, which was validated by both VIP and experts. The framework subsequently consisted of 11 components categorized into five layers, each layer of which is responsible for a different function.

This framework provides essential components required for building standard indoor maps as a foundation for indoor navigations systems for people with visual impairment.

This framework lays the foundation for a range of indoor-based applications by using this SRF to represent indoor spaces. Example applications include: indoor navigation by people with disabilities, robots and autonomous systems, security and surveillance, and context and spatial awareness.

This paper presents the validated spatial representation for indoor navigation by people with visual impairment with its details and description, methodology, results and findings of the validation of the SRF.