Written by Babak Toghiani-Rizi and Bawer Calli.
Living a life without vision is hard to imagine. Being able to see is such a large part of our everyday life that many of us consider life without it useless. Thanks to our vision, we may spot potential dangers/threats, get emotionally moved by beautiful scenery or paintings and it helps us to communicate more efficiently. But what about people living with visual impairments?
The first pairwise exercise we got in this course was an attempt to raise our awareness of the difficulties blind people encounter on a daily basis. We were instructed to act out an everyday situation of someone living with with a visual impairment: To walk across the white paths on the train bridge without using your vision. The path is not only marked in white (so that everyone else can see it and, hopefully, leave the path free), but also has a certain structure to make it distinct so you can feel when you are walking along it.
We took turns standing on the path, closing our eyes and attempting to walk along it. What we noticed immediately was that the feeling of the paths’s structure is heavily dependent on what kind of shoes you wear. Shoes with thick soles (such as boots), makes it more difficult to actually know if you’re walking along the path or not as it’s way harder sense the difference in structure between the white path and the regular floor tiles.
Shoes with thin soles (such as sneakers) makes it much easier to feel that you’re walking along the right path.
We were at the station under, what we consider, optimal conditions. We were there during mid day when the station was mostly empty and we could conduct the experiment with almost no interference. We didn’t need to rush and we both wore sneakers and could clearly feel the structure of the path.
But if we would to imagine the worst possible case – the station is crowded, you have shoes with thick and stiff soles and you are in a hurry – the experience would be totally different.
When the morning rush is underway people are usually in a hurry and less considerate towards their environment. people are rushing past you in a hurry and you are trying to walk along the right path using just the soles of your feet to direct you.
There’s also a greater risk for accidents to occur. Stressed people who might not know what the path is for, or maybe just doesn’t care, can run into you.
We asked 10 randoms if they even knew what the white paths were used for, and only one of them knew. There is no visible information for people to learn what the path is for. If people do not know what the path is for, how can they then leave it free for blind people to use? How can people be more considerate towards people who might walk in a slower pace because they can’t see if they don’t know why the person is walking slowly? This is crucial information that has been left out and it needs to be fixed. There is also the issue that blind people might be unaware of the path’s existence.
Before we started this course we had no idea what the white path was for, and we’ve been living here for years, so we imagine that a lot of blind people are also unaware of it.
As we are not blind we don’t know how blind people perceive these tiles and the situations they face when trying to navigate through a stressful environment. We are told that when one of your senses is impaired, the other ones are heightened, so all we can do is hope that blind people really find these tiles helpful. In our most unprofessional opinion, we like the idea of the tiles but there are lots of improvements to be made. But as we’ve said, we were thrown into a situation we are not at all used to. Blind people have been walking around independently for a long time and are used to it. They might feel the tiles through thick or thin soles, they might be used to stressful people walking around them and bumping in to them from time to time, so we hope they can cope with it better than we can.
Non-excluding Design 