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01. RESEARCH

Motivation & Research

Discovering The Gap Exploring the accessibility gap in indoor climbing and defining our target stakeholders.

Why We Chose Go Climbers

Active Lifestyles

We chose the Active track because accessibility in physical activity should not only mean access to a venue, but also meaningful participation within the activity itself. Indoor climbing made this gap especially visible to us. Climbing depends heavily on route preview, movement planning, and real-time action, so visual information is not secondary; it shapes how climbers understand and enjoy the route. For blind and low-vision climbers, this creates barriers to independent route understanding, usable in-climb guidance, and confident self-directed participation. Existing assistive research for accessible climbing and embodied guidance is promising but still early-stage, while mainstream climbing apps mainly focus on route browsing, logging, beta sharing, and community rather than BLV accessibility.

This made the Active track the strongest fit for our project. It allowed us to design for agency, flow, confidence, and enjoyment in a physically demanding setting, not just basic usability. Through HoldLight, we wanted to support active participation rather than passive accommodation: helping blind and low-vision climbers understand routes before climbing, receive lightweight support during movement, and stay in control while preserving human fallback when safety or uncertainty requires it.

Problem Space

HoldLight is an accessibility-oriented mobile web app for indoor climbing. The system combines route and hold recognition, simplified route preview, short audio guidance, and assistant-supported fallback to reduce uncertainty before and during climbing.

Problem 01

Route visibility problem

Indoor routes are visually encoded through hold colour, position, and route shape. Blind and low-vision climbers often need another person to translate that structure before they can plan movement.

Design implication: provide a confidence-building route preview before climbing.

Problem 02

Cognitive load problem

Long explanations are hard to retain once the climber is physically engaged on the wall. Guidance needs to be brief, timed carefully, and easy to repeat.

Design implication: keep in-climb support short, audio-first, and low-overload.

Problem 03

Safety and trust problem

A climbing support system cannot pretend to be perfectly certain. Users need to know when recognition is uncertain and how to pause, repeat, or ask for human help.

Design implication: make fallback and recovery states explicit.

Academic Research Gap

Paper 01

Braun et al. (2025)

Strengths

  • Clearly identifies the real accessibility barriers faced by BLV climbers in climbing and bouldering.
  • Provides a strong user-needs foundation that supports the motivation for assistive climbing design.
  • Shows that accessibility should be treated as a core design requirement rather than an optional add-on.

Limitations

  • Remains mainly at the needs-assessment stage rather than demonstrating a complete deployable system.
  • Provides limited evidence on how support should be delivered during an actual climb without disrupting flow.
  • Does not fully combine pre-climb route understanding, real-time lightweight guidance, and gym-ready implementation.
Paper 02

Ramsay & Chang (2020)

Strengths

  • Demonstrates that auditory feedback can act as a meaningful non-visual channel for blind climbers.
  • Explores support during the climb, addressing a stage often missed by route-browsing tools.
  • Offers a technically creative approach for translating body-position information into accessible feedback.

Limitations

  • Sound-based feedback may add cognitive load if climbers must interpret too much information while moving.
  • The focus is mainly on body pose rather than a complete understanding of the route sequence and hold layout.
  • The system appears closer to a research prototype than a practical tool that can be easily adopted by climbing gyms.
Paper 03

Richardson et al. (2022)

Strengths

  • Uses computer vision to address the visual dependency of rock climbing in a direct and relevant way.
  • Provides useful inspiration for automatic hold detection and sensory substitution in accessible climbing.
  • Moves beyond simple logging or route browsing by attempting to convert visual route information into alternative feedback.

Limitations

  • Computer vision may be difficult to keep reliable in real gyms with variable lighting, occlusion, wall angles, and crowded conditions.
  • Additional sensing or feedback devices may affect comfort, safety, or climbing flow.
  • The work demonstrates technical potential but provides limited evidence of a robust, scalable gym deployment workflow.
Paper 04

Simone & Galatolo (2020)

Strengths

  • Provides rich insight into how visually impaired climbers are guided through real human instruction.
  • Highlights the importance of timing, trust, communication, and safety in accessible climbing support.
  • Offers practical design implications for creating guidance that feels natural rather than purely technical.

Limitations

  • The approach depends heavily on another person, which limits independent route preview and decision-making.
  • Partner-based instruction is difficult to scale consistently across normal climbing gyms.
  • Frequent verbal guidance may interrupt rhythm, concentration, and the climber's own problem-solving process.

Commercial Product Gap

Product 01

KAYA

Strengths

  • Provides strong route discovery, beta content, and climbing media for mainstream climbers.
  • Supports long-term engagement through logging, progress tracking, and performance history.
  • Builds a community ecosystem where climbers can share beta, routes, and climbing experiences.

Limitations

  • The experience is strongly visual-first, relying heavily on images, videos, maps, and visual route information.
  • Beta videos are not sufficiently accessible without structured audio description or non-visual route summaries.
  • The product supports climbing participation broadly but is not designed around BLV climbers' independent route understanding or in-climb assistance.
Product 02

Vertical-Life

Strengths

  • Organises route, topo, grade, and climbing-area information in a clear and scalable structure.
  • Supports pre-climb planning by helping climbers browse routes, locations, and difficulty levels.
  • Shows that digital route information platforms can be commercially viable and integrated into climbing communities.

Limitations

  • Visual topos remain the central interaction method, creating a major accessibility barrier for BLV users.
  • Route information is not transformed into step-by-step audio, tactile, or semantic explanations.
  • The platform focuses on route browsing and guidebook access rather than real-time, low-interruption climbing support.
Product 03

TopLogger

Strengths

  • Fits well into indoor climbing gym contexts, especially for route updates, grading, and logging.
  • Encourages continued participation through dashboards, rankings, personal progress, and achievement tracking.
  • Connects climbers with gym-specific route resets and performance records, making it practical for regular gym use.

Limitations

  • Logging a completed climb does not help BLV climbers understand the route before attempting it.
  • Competitive features such as rankings and leaderboards do not directly address accessibility, independence, or safety.
  • The value of the system depends heavily on whether a specific gym has adopted and maintained the platform.
Product 04

RouteIt Indoor Bouldering

Strengths

  • Focuses specifically on indoor bouldering, making it more relevant to gym-based climbing workflows.
  • Supports pre-climb preparation through route images, beta videos, and route status tracking.
  • Combines gym connection, beta sharing, personal statistics, and route progress in one mainstream climbing platform.

Limitations

  • The interface remains image- and video-heavy, which makes independent use difficult for BLV climbers.
  • Its usefulness depends on gym coverage, route database completeness, and local adoption.
  • It does not provide a robust method for real-time in-climb guidance that preserves flow and reduces cognitive load.

References & Sources Reviewed

Sources Reviewed & References

This section lists the academic papers and commercial products reviewed during the research stage. These sources informed the problem framing, accessibility gap analysis, design requirements, and final evaluation focus of HoldLight.

A. Sources Reviewed

Academic Papers

[1]
Braun et al. (2025) — Needs Assessment for an Assistance System for the Visually Impaired and Blind in Climbing and Bouldering

Informed our understanding of BLV climbers’ accessibility needs and the gap between climbing practice and assistive system design.

[2]
Ramsay & Chang (2020) — Body Pose Sonification for a View-Independent Auditory Aid to Blind Rock Climbers

Helped us compare HoldLight with audio-based climbing assistance and understand the limitation of technical guidance without a full workflow.

[3]
Richardson et al. (2022) — Climb-o-Vision: A Computer Vision Driven Sensory Substitution Device for Rock Climbing

Provided a useful reference for computer-vision-assisted climbing support, while highlighting the need for deployable and user-controlled interaction.

[4]
Simone & Galatolo (2020) — Climbing as a Pair: Instructions and Instructed Body Movements in Indoor Climbing with Visually Impaired Athletes

Informed our understanding of human guidance, verbal instruction, timing, and the social nature of BLV climbing support.

Commercial Products

[5]
KAYA — climbing app for route discovery, beta videos, logging, and community features.

Useful for understanding commercial climbing platforms, but it provides little publicly documented accessibility support for BLV climbers.

[6]
Vertical-Life — climbing platform/app for indoor and outdoor topos, gym route information, route logging, and climber feedback.

Shows how route information and gym feedback are supported in mainstream climbing apps, but not specifically for BLV route understanding.

[7]
TopLogger — indoor climbing app for route logging, grade tracking, gym rankings, and route updates.

Strong for indoor logging and progress tracking, but does not address accessible route preview or in-climb next-hold guidance.

[8]
RouteIt Indoor Bouldering — indoor bouldering app for gym route images, beta videos, climb status tracking, and personal statistics.

Useful for route images and beta sharing, but still assumes visual route access and does not support BLV climbing workflow needs.

B. Formal IEEE References

  1. [1]F. Braun, J. Stadlbauer, S. Haug, and V. I. Schneider, “Needs assessment for an assistance system for the visually impaired and blind in climbing and bouldering,” Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, vol. 327, pp. 29–34, 2025, doi: 10.3233/SHTI250153.
  2. [2]J. Ramsay and A. Chang, “Body pose sonification for a view-independent auditory aid to blind rock climbers,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, 2020.
  3. [3]M. Richardson, K. Petrini, and M. J. Proulx, “Climb-o-Vision: A computer vision driven sensory substitution device for rock climbing,” in Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2022, pp. 1–7, doi: 10.1145/3491101.3519680.
  4. [4]M. Simone and R. Galatolo, “Climbing as a pair: Instructions and instructed body movements in indoor climbing with visually impaired athletes,” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 155, pp. 286–302, 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2019.09.008.
  5. [5]KAYA, “KAYA | The Climber’s App.” Accessed: Apr. 29, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://kayaclimb.com/
  6. [6]Vertical-Life, “Vertical-Life App.” Accessed: Apr. 29, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://gym.vertical-life.info/vertical-life-app/
  7. [7]TopLogger, “TopLogger — Track your climbing progress.” Accessed: Apr. 29, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://toplogger.nu/en/for-climbers
  8. [8]Apple App Store, “RouteIt Indoor Bouldering.” Accessed: Apr. 29, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/routeit-indoor-bouldering/id1521156087

Stakeholder Overview