As designers, it is incredibly important to understand how our clients live and function within a space. Our duties go beyond just making beautiful interiors because functionality and ease of use is ultimately what determines the success of a design over time. To further explore our current client's disability, some peers and myself completed some exercises to understand as best as we could what it is like to live with various forms of visual impairment.
The above photos show our team attempting to read with the impaired vision cards and a plastic bag, both of which simulated different kinds of vision loss. These weren't very difficult, and even seemed similar to my vision without contact lenses. The challenge of having decreased visual function was, however, put much more in perspective once we began walking through the building with glasses that represented partial loss of vision and that of a legally blind individual.
Watching my other peers, I was aware that the glasses were hard to see through, though I still did not anticipate just how difficult it would be to navigate my way through the building. As we all took turns completing the exercises, We all noticed successful ways in which signs, lighting, wall colors, and even buttons were in indicating various cues to a person who is visually imparied. Unfortunately, we also managed to find ways in which accessible design decisions were insufficient or absent altogether.
Some helpful cues were dark slip-resistant strips when going up or down the stairs to indicate the end or beginning of each stair tread. The more successful application was in the Holland Terrell Library Atrium (as shown above on the right), which had white stairs and black slip-resistant strips, which was much easier to see with the glasses due to the high contrast. Looking at the photo above on the left, any person with normal vision might assume that the contrast between the green stairs and black strips is perfectly sufficient. We found that with the glasses, the stairs just appear green and provide no clear indication of a change in levels. An easy change that might help the visibility of the stairs would be to add lighting about the stairs. The surface of the stairs is much more reflective than the strips, which might provide more contrast for users unable to detect each level of the stairs.
One part of the exercise was to try to use two ATM's in the building, though we chose to try all four and a Redbox kiosk as well. What we noticed immediately was the audio assistance jack for headphones and the keypads, which all varied slightly. The proximity of the keypad to the jack was another observation that we made, due to three having them right next to each other, while another had them placed on seperate surfaces of the ATM.
For a person who suffers from severe or even moderate vision loss, the jack and keypad that are placed close together would likely be much more successful because that is likely the first place that they would reach out to. The jacks placed next to the keypad also had a larger and more detailed braille pad which I would assume would be easier to feel versus the small pad near the screen that has little braille and could be mistaken for just another textured surface on the machine.
One other helpful device on the machine was the slot in which a user would place their card. Every machine had some sort of light that indicated where to insert the card, however, the slots that lit up the area directly around the slot seemed much easier to use than the machines that had a light directly above or below it. By lighting areas other than the slot, it promped my classmates and myself to try to fit our cards where the light was flashing, which was not correct. Instead we were left fumbling with the machine until we finally found the slot to insert our cards.
Overall, the experience proved to be very valuable to us as learning designers and provided us with an opportunity to "see" firsthand what challenges visually impaired people face everyday. Though some measures to visually aid users might not have been ideal, the consideration for those who have to struggle to complete everyday tasks was admired and acknowledged by each of my peers and myself. From this experience, I hope to take our collective observations and create spaces that are functional and easy to use for any given person.
