10 Accessible Environments
Learning Objectives
There is an increasing awareness of social responsibility in the community and the benefits to society of social inclusion, including for disabled people. In many countries this awareness is reinforced by anti-discrimination legislation and advisory and regulatory guidelines. However, in many other cases, even where there is legislation, it is not supported by a serious commitment to change. Despite this, there have been some real advances, including in the design of the urban community environment for accessibility. In this chapter, aspects of the accessible environment relevant to visually impaired and blind people are described. The learning objectives for the chapter are as follows:
•Understanding an overall view of the design of accessible environments for visually impaired and blind people.
•Learning about assistive technology systems that are used to make urban environments accessible to visually impaired and blind people.
•Understanding the basic principles of a number of embedded navigational and information system that could be used to improve environmental accessibility.
10.1 Introduction
This chapter is concerned with two main concepts. The first is that of inclusiveness for all members of the community and the second is how to realise this inclusiveness in all aspects of the physical urban environment. Existing legal and administrative mechanisms are discussed in this opening section of this chapter. This is followed by a discussion of specific assistive technology systems and approaches that can be used to create an accessible environment for visually impaired and blind people.
10.1.1 Legislative and Regulatory Framework
Although some progress has been made towards the recognition of the importance of full social inclusion for all members of the community, considerable further work
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will still be required. In many different countries, there are considerable differences in the extent and type of legislation and how it is implemented, enforced and monitored. For legislation to be successful, the procedures for implementation, enforcement and monitoring are particularly important. However, progress has been rather limited and the impact of potentially useful legislation has often been reduced by the lack of sufficiently stringent sanctions for non-compliance and inadequate attention to monitoring compliance and the impacts of the legislation.
However, despite the drawbacks in the remit of much of the legislation, it has led to the development of regulations and guidelines for accessibility. In some cases, the legislation has included the creation of bodies to oversee the implementation of the law or particular aspects of it. For instance, the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 set up a Disability Rights Commission. A number of professional bodies have produced guidelines on accessibility for their members or the profession in general. Such guidelines may be based on ensuring compliance with the legislation or could go beyond it. The physical environment involves several different types of installations and services. For historical and other reasons they may be overseen by a number of different professional bodies, which can complicate implementing and overseeing accessibility. As an illustrative example, a brief discussion of building accessibility legislation in the USA is presented. Although by no means without flaws, environmental accessibility legislation seems more advanced in the USA than in Europe.
10.1.1.1 Building Accessibility Legislation in the U.S.A.
Primary legislation. The first piece of legislation was the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) of 1968. This covered the accessibility standards required for premises and facilities constructed with Federal funds. This was followed by the most significant piece of US legislation on this subject, namely, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 1990. This is a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination because of disability. The areas covered in this act are very wide ranging and include employment, state and local government, public accommodation, commercial facilities, transportation and telecommunications.
Implementation. An independent Federal Agency, the U.S. Access Board, has the responsibility to create guidelines that serve as standards for the implementation of the legislation. In 2004, the Access Board announced the new set of revised Americans with Disabilities—Architectural Barriers Act Accessibility Guidelines to meet the requirements of both the old and new legislation. These standards comprise ten chapters of regulations and their coverage includes accessible routes (Chapter 4), communication elements and features (Chapter 7) and recreation facilities and play areas (Chapter 10).
Enforcement. In the case of non-compliance, the matter is directed to the U.S. Department of Justice and pursued through the courts, if this is necessary. However, the US Department of Transportation is responsible for overseeing enforcement in the area of public transport.
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A number of countries, including Australia, Canada and many of the European Union countries, have legislation on the rights of disabled people. However, the details of the legislation and the mechanisms for enforcing it vary from country to country.
10.1.2 Accessible Environments: An Overview
The volume of guidelines available from any of the national regulatory bodies indicates the range of issues and complexity of environmental accessibility. The focus of this chapter is accessibility for blind and visually impaired people. However, good practice should apply design for all or universal design principles wherever possible. This involves consideration of accessibility for the whole community, independent of factors such as disability, size, gender, age or ethnic origin. In many cases accessibility features for one group of disabled people have benefits for the whole community, whereas in others different groups of disabled people have differing, possibly mutually contradictory needs. Therefore, it is important to take into account the whole community of potential users when attempting to design accessible environments. For instance, tactile pavements, vibrating warning pads and visual and vibrating indicators of the time remaining to cross at traffic crossings can make these crossings safer for most community members, including children, elderly people, deafblind people, people with cognitive impairments, blind and visually impaired people and non-disabled people. However, while useful in improving safety for most community members, audible warnings and lights can cause stress and reduce safety for people with noiseand/or light-sensitivity.
There are two main components to environmental accessibility for the visually impaired and blind community (see Figure 10.1):
•Good design of the physical environment, which includes the positioning of street furniture to avoid potential hazards, good lighting, the use of colour contrasts and making passageways sufficiently wide for a blind person with a guide dog or human guide.
•The provision of navigation and information systems, for example infrared Talking Signs or a beacon system of the type used in Prague in the Czech Republic.
An important prerequisite for using good design principles for accessible environments is that designers, planners and architects are educated in the principles of accessible environments and design for all as part of good design practice. One example of a creative approach to teaching design for all was the Universal Design Education Project (Welch 1995), a funded design education project in departments of architecture, land architecture and industrial and interior design in 22 institutes and universities in the USA. This project aimed to make the principles of universal design an integral component of the student’s design education and give them an understanding of the different ways in which a broad range of people use and experience products and the built environment. This project differed from previous work on integrating user needs into design education in its focus on values rather than skills and specific topics.
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Figure 10.1. Accessible environments: an overview
One important focus of most of the participating institutions was education about the different characteristics, desires and requirements of end-users, particularly disabled end-users. To achieve the necessary input, a common approach was the use of disabled user consultants in the classroom and the design studio. These consultants gave students the opportunity to perceive a product or environment from a very different perspective, and learn about the real needs of disabled people and how following guidelines alone was unlikely to be sufficient to meet these needs. Students found consultants who were able to talk about the details of their lives particularly helpful. Some student stereotypes and preconceptions may have been overcome by presenting the consultants as experts rather than users with unmet needs (Welch 1995).
Another commonly used technique was simulation exercises in which students, for instance, negotiated the campus in a wheelchair or wearing a blindfold. This approach has been criticised by organisations of disabled people and the project organisers (Welch 1995) as trivialising disability issues or reinforcing negative stereotypes about disability. However, such exercises can have a limited role in making students aware of environmental barriers, though not of the experience of being disabled. A preferred approach for learning about environmental barriers, as well as the strategies used by disabled people to overcome them, is for a student to accompany a user consultant around a particular environment and then discuss the experience with the consultant.
The categorisation on which the subsequent discussion in this chapter is based is shown in Figure 10.1.
10.1.3 Principles for the Design of Accessible Environments
While some factors are specific to particular environments, there are a number of general principles that hold for the various different types of environments. These principles include the following, but it should be noted that the list is by no means exhaustive:
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•Good lighting—all areas should be well illuminated, generally using diffuse rather than direct lighting and taking care to avoid shadows. As far as possible, a choice of lighting types and the facility to regulate lighting levels should be provided in all rooms in public buildings.
•Well-designed signage systems, which provide both directional information, for example, the direction to the nearest station and location information, for example, each room should have a sign on its door. Whenever appropriate the information should be given in tactile, visual and audio form.
•Tactile paving should be used to warn of hazards and to direct people to facilities.
•The use of colour contrasts, including colour contrasting strips, to provide information and make it easier for blind and visually impaired people to distinguish, for instance, door handles and furniture.
•The provision of wide pathways which can accommodate wheelchair users and blind people with guide dogs, a sighted guide or guide-communicator in the case of deafblind people.
•Good layout design so that facilities, such as benches, litter bins and furniture, do not become potentially hazardous obstacles.
•Matt surfaces to reduce glare.
•Regular maintenance programmes which should be used to reduce the number of avoidable hazards resulting from a poor state of building and streetscape repair.
•Consultation with disabled people, including blind and visually impaired people.
10.1.4Relationship Between Environmental Information
and Navigation Systems and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Orientation Systems
An integrated environmental information and navigation system is able to provide some of the same types of functions as the widely available commercial orientation systems based on the global positioning systems (GPS) technology. These functions include the location of a wide range of different buildings, environmental features and facilities, and how to get to them. The environmental information system could also provide additional information about these locations, for instance by pressing a button located on the system. This is analogous to the point of interest facility of GPS orientation systems for blind and visually impaired people. Currently, unlike orientation systems, environmental information and navigation systems are not able to provide users with routes to a particular destination that they can peruse in advance of travel or direct users to a destination from greater than a relatively short distance, determined by the transmission range of the technology used. They are also not able to search a database for a particular facility, such as the nearest public library, and direct the user to it or to give the user’s location relative to appropriate landmarks. There could be benefits in developing integrated information and navigation systems that could provide many of these facilities. One