Blind Audition

Today I had the opportunity to see life through the eyes of a person who is legally blind. Putting on sunglasses with the lenses covered in Vaseline, my sight became 80-90% lessened of what it is on a usual day. I wear glasses and contacts on a daily basis so I already had an idea of what it feels like to not be able to see everything as clearly, however in this experimental research I was able to remove my glasses (considerably reducing my visibility as is) and then adding the sunglasses which resulted in an eyesight much like that of a person who is legally blind, according to the experiment. With the sunglasses, everything was dark and blurry causing most views to be blobs of color and/or light. Maneuvering on campus within the student union building, I was challenged when trying to walk up and down stairs, use elevators, use the ATM kiosk, and even just attempting to shop for the clothing. Much of the stairs had great contrast and dark textured no-slip grips on them which helped in aiding to see the height changes, however a few different stair cases did not and those were much harder to see and I had to use my foot to feel for the elevation change. There were two different elevators in the building, one within the clothing shop and another in the building's main entrance area, the one within the store was much harder to manuever as it had no brail, speakers, or helpful colors to guide someone that is visually impaired while the other elevator spoke the floor that it was one and when the door was open. The ATM's were assistant with headphone spaces for audio guidance which is highly helpful, however the key pad with the numbers had no cues to help with which number was at the top and/at the bottom (since some number keypads start with 1 at the top left and others with 1 at the bottom left.) I attempted to shop for clothing with the thought process of wondering what its like to choose clothing without even knowing what the clothing actually looks like, but based off the supposed color, design, and fabric. It was much harder than I had expected and I would look at some clothing thinking they were very cute and when removing the sunglasses they would be a style that I didn't actually like, It was really interesting to experience. While processing this whole experience, I realized that I could really only see the contrasting of light within corridors and walkways and the "light at the end of the tunnel" as I kept calling it with hallways and windows at the end which would reflect down the floor's surface. To a point, the shiny floors reflected a lot of light which could be confusing, but when walking down the main aisle of the building the windows and their reflections lit up the path in a way. All of the people in the building looked like dark shadows and I would jump when people got too close as the depth perception I had was a lot worse than normal, even without my glasses. A few issues I ran into were doors that were closed would look open to me, I almost ran into the glass doors as I could not tell they were there at all aside from having my hands in front of me, I knocked over a small shelf of Nook covers in the book store, some of the stairs would look like a black blob in front of me and if there wasn't a person on the stairs I couldn't tell the distance or angle at all. I noticed that a lot of walls and doors would have high contrast allowing me to see where the entrances were however, others would not and I would have to interpret the entryway and hope that I was heading in the right direction. Overall I feel that this experience was a great one for me for my future project involving a couple with a visually impaired wife and for overall understanding of diversity within sight all together. I feel that being able to understand how my client (and even others in the world) views life on a daily basis can and will help me to better understand where they are coming from, thus bettering my design when keeping those that are visually impaired in mind. 

(Below is a photograph of the stairs with the contrast and texture change as well as a very quick sketch that I did of how the lighting was seen through the glasses with the lighted pathway of reflection and the dark shadows all around)