Hands-Free Railway Booking: Designing and Audio-Only Reservation Interface for Blind and Partially Sighted Users

Abstract

Buying a train ticket is one of those tasks most people do without a second thought, yet for a person who cannot see, the standard online journey—scanning timetables, clicking seat maps, reading confirmation screens—can be genuinely impossible to complete alone. This paper documents the design of a fully audio- based reservation system intended to close that gap. Instead of adding accessibility features to an existing visual interface, the system was built from the ground up with voice as its only interaction channel: users speak to it, and it speaks back. No screen interaction is required at any stage.

The technical foundation consists of three well-established components—automatic speech recognition to capture what the user says, a language understanding layer to work out what they mean, and a speech synthesizer to deliver responses—connected to a standard railway booking back end. The harder engineering challenge is not assembling these parts but making the assembled system behave consistently in the kinds of imperfect real-world conditions that a blind traveler actually encounters: background noise, regional pronunciation, patchy mobile coverage, and the occasional wrong word. This paper documents the design decisions made in response to those challenges, describes how the system is structured, and sets out clearly what it cannot yet do.