Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Flooring

[As shown in slide 11 photo, this room is] fairly successful; [it] could use some tweaking when you look at it from that point of view. Somebody asked yesterday about polarizing film for flooring. We can do that with matte texturing. We don’t have to have highly reflective surfaces that will still reflect light but spread it, diffuse that light instead of pinpoint reflections.

Stairways

This one [slide 12 photo], I actually have a question for the low-vision users in the room. We’ve got a picture of a stair. It’s got stair texture to it. It’s different from the carpeting that you’re coming up to and then the white line denoting where the first step down is. Does the white stringer help you identify where each of those steps is, having a contrast color for the vertical on the sides versus the horizontal of the tread?

Responses by [two Participants]: It has enough resolution; somewhat. The orientation of the building structure is actually to teach their clients to look for that.

To look for that, yeah. So maybe in that black stairwell you missed, if it had been a contrasting color on the side, you would see that depth on each step.

Comment by Marsha Mazz: I have some reservations about looking down while I’m trying to use a stair. And because building codes typically require stairs – treads and risers to be regular – you can’t have different heights and sizes. What’s helpful to me is to have a marking on the tread – on the first tread and the last tread. But I will say that I know personally that if I try to watch my feet as I descend stairs, my balance is changed, and I don’t trust my [perception] anymore. And so I think I am better served by keeping my head up and my body erect and trusting my other senses as I descend – in particular, descending the stair. And that’s even more important on an escalator if I’m ever tempted to walk.

Question by [Participant]: Do you think the railing is a clue as well?

Response by Marsha Mazz: Absolutely. In fact, just the other night I had to descend from a dais, and there was no handrail at all on the dais. I had to ask for assistance. It had more to do with fearfulness than anything else.

Comments by [two Participants]: I don’t see a handrail on that stair. It’s there. It isn’t in the photograph.

Response by Erin Schambureck: It’s there. It’s cut out of the top of the picture. It’s from the Johnsonite Flooring website, so they [focused] on the flooring material.

Comment by [Participant]: I’ll tell you, this is subtle. What would be a lot better would be alternating colors on the stairs.

Question by Erin Schambureck: And that wouldn’t provide a confusion for depth change?

Response by [Participant]: I think it could.

Question and Comment by [Participant]: Wouldn’t it have been better to do something with the tread, the edge of the tread so you can see [it]? Even though you have the visual clue along the stringer, there’s still that issue of the tread itself. Everything looks the same.

Response by Erin Schambureck: There’s that helpful shadow, too, where, in this case you have some shadow along the left.

Comment by [Participant]: I would say the goal is not subtlety.

As we’re talking about stairs, one of the worst stairs I’ve ever seen is the main exit stair out of Penn Station in New York. Somebody had this idea to paint graphics on the stairs so that, if you elevated the stair, you’d have a picture [A photo of the main exit stair is not available]. And then it’s painted over each of the risers. And the risers are not equal height. I’ve seen so many people fall down those stairs, fall up the stairs.

Comment by [Participant]: It’s one thing, a stair that would be unacceptable in new construction.

Question and comment by [Participant]: Why is it still in existence? I mean, Penn Station at rush hour – this is Penn Station in New York, the main exit stair. It has so much traffic. And I don’t understand how it is still there.

Question by [Participant]. Why is it different heights?

Responses by [five Participants]: Pre-code. I don’t know. It’s an older stair, though. It’s an older stair, but still it should be torn out and rebuilt. And then to put this graphic image on the risers going up. Crazy.

Comment by [Participant]: I don’t know how the other users would feel, but I have a particular problem on a curvilinear stair because you want to hold on to that handrail. If you’re right-handed, you’re walking on the right side, [and] you’re on that narrow end of the tread.

Comment by [Participant]: I guess if it’s clockwise – but very often you find that you’re on the narrow side of that tread. And if you’re on the wide side of the tread, it’s equally problematic, because you still don’t know where the edge of the tread is.

Comment by [Participant]: You have different cadence [in your walk] at different points.

Comment by [Participant]: Well, I don’t know if it’s ruled out by code now or not, but on landings there are sometimes diagonal steps.

Responses by [seven Participants]: Totally ill-advised. Not allowed in any commercial stair, [anymore]. Except in residential. Well, they exist, and they’re really hazardous, even for people who are sighted.

Furniture Layouts

Repetitive or intuitive furniture layouts are easy to navigate. Avoid “mine-field” layouts. Cubicles can be problematic. In the picture on the left [in slide 13] is the crazy building floor plan from 50 years ago. The picture on the right is taking that to the other extreme; again, that cubicle-farm concept that you get yourself in the middle of this and you have no idea which way is up.

You are hoping there is a window on one [façade] to orient yourself, but there’s no way to get it, especially with the 60-inch-high panels. It might be a little lower, but you still have to figure out where the pathway is. You can see the exit then, but how do you get there?

Comment by [Participant]: I would think [this layout] would be problematic for someone who doesn’t see well.

Comment by [Participant]: It reminds me of a layout, a cubicle layout for [the new] Coast Guard headquarters at the St. E campus. Acres and acres and acres of cubicles. You really do need street signs. It’s three football fields long and has nine elevator cores. You have to enter the building from the front. And if you have the misfortune of being low vision or being in a wheelchair and you work on the other end of that building, which steps down a hill, you’ve got to traverse all those elevator cores, all those corridors, in order to get to where you work, because you don’t have any entry point -- other than from a garage on the side of the building, you have no entry point other than the main entrance.