Navigation maps introduce enhanced features

[Courtesy of Naver Corp.]

Navigation applications are enhancing features for user safety and convenience, such as notifying users of disaster areas in real time. They are also improving navigation for transportation vulnerable groups including the disabled and elderly, aiming to enhance accessibility so that a diverse group of users can use the service without issues.

South Korean platform giant Naver Corp. on Wednesday rolled out a new update for Naver Maps, detailing disaster notifications for the users’ location and enhancing disaster information guidance during navigation.

Disaster notifications include various incidents on roads such as road closures, construction, traffic accidents, and disasters. With this update, Naver Map has newly added disaster guidance for flood alerts, dam releases, and large fires, reorganizing the existing four categories (traffic control, accidents, construction, and others) into seven icons.

Kakao Corp. provides alternative routes during full road closures via KakaoMap and allows users to share real-time weather conditions on the “Rain” tab in KakaoTalk’s open chat. For its part, T Map Mobility offers a flood risk area alert service, notifying users entering flood alert points with navigation screens and voice guidance.

Navigation apps are also enhancing features to secure mobility and accessibility for transportation vulnerable groups.

Naver plans to introduce a service on Naver Map in the latter half of 2024 that finds paths avoiding stairs when using public transportation. The “Stair Avoidance Route” is a pathfinding service that helps users who have difficulty using stairs avoid them during their travels, with beneficiaries including crutch users and wheelchair users as well as pregnant women and the elderly. The company applied this star avoidance route to pedestrian route finding in April 2023. It plans to expand this to public transportation route guidance in the second half of 2024, continually enhancing data to increase route suitability and accuracy.

Kakao began providing the “Barrier-free Sharing Road” map on KakaoMap in collaboration with the Korea Forest Welfare Institute in May 2024, which features deck roads and yellow soil paved roads in forests, allowing groups such as the disabled, pregnant women, and the elderly to use the forest safely. KakaoMap’s Searching for the Barrier-free Sharing Road provides information on 113 locations nationwide, including location, route, total distance, and entrance information.

Kakao also started providing information on subway stations such as platform gaps and height differences between platforms and trains in 2022. Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Companion Map, launched in April 2024, is an integrated transportation service for transportation vulnerable groups offering elevator route guidance for wheelchair and stroller users, escalator route guidance for the elderly and pregnant women, and general route guidance.