Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision
Erin M. Schambureck, IIDA, CID, LEED™ AP. Vision and Wayfinding: obstacles to spatial orientation and navigation
Wayfinding is more than just graphics (slides 2 – 4)
Cognitive process (slides 2 - 4).
[Wayfinding is] really more of a cognitive process. You gather information at the beginning. You cite and execute a path to take. And then you continue to process information on the way.
A good analogy for sighted people is when you’re explaining to someone how to get to your house, you say, “Get off the highway at – they give you those three exits. Take that street west. Turn right at the first stoplight. Go through the stop sign. Take a left. It’s the second blue house on the left.”
We don’t get those kinds of cues, necessarily, in buildings very often because we don’t have street names, you know, so we’re still trying to use those same identifying cues from the architecture or from the signage or from the finishes applied to that space to help us navigate space. And that’s even harder when you can’t see what you’re supposed to be using as those visual cues. So a real cognitive process.
Some of the cues that we use in way finding, a lot of these are sort of self-explanatory.
Audio Cues (slide 3)
We use audio cues to know that the elevator has arrived. It makes a dinging noise. Now, whether or not you just got an up elevator instead of the down one you wanted isn’t always obvious when the tone is exactly the same. Some newer buildings are going to vocal tones that say, “Going up,” “Going down,” and announcing the floor number as you reach it.
Emergency warnings. I was reading the emergency exit plan in the hotel last night, and it had a line that said, “The emergency warning sounds like, ‘Woo, woo.’”
So we expect those audio cues –
Question from [Participant]: Was that with a Washington or Minnesota accent? Many languages have “Woo, woo.”
Response by Erin Schambureck: You know, so sometimes, they’re kind of humorous, but they do provide some information. Again, an audio warning that is a noise, a loud noise, will tell you that something is wrong, but may not tell you what is wrong and how to proceed. My mom was saying that the smoke detectors in the house went off while my dad was out of town last week, and it was a female voice telling her that the battery was dying at 2:30 in the morning. So it’s helpful to know what’s gone wrong.
And so we could be a little more clear about the audio cues that we’re providing in a way finding system.
Tactile Cues (slide 3)
Floor texture changing is a really big tactile cue. If you’ve got floor material that is of a similar tone or hue and you change that floor texture, someone’s going to know that something has changed.
Braille and tactile maps. Braille is a great tactile cue, but as people have pointed out, you have to find the sign first and then you have to be a part of that five percent of the low-vision population that can actually read Braille in the first place. You know, that’s a pretty small number. So how can we use tactile maps, other raised lettering, or other things that will provide better [information]?
Visual Cues (slide 4)
We’re also looking at visual cues. This is what everybody, for the most part, understands, that we’re looking at the signage that says which direction the elevator is, a visual texture change, whether it’s a change in the color of the flooring, the color of the wall, that you’ve got an accent paint color to identify the elevators.
The lighting. You can have consistent lighting throughout a hallway and then have a highlighted spot on something to highlight that there’s something different going on there or a change in the type of lighting at a location.
The signage. If you see a door that says, “Authorized personnel only,” you’re not going to go beyond that door and you know you’re not authorized. Flags for alarm pulls. And then on the right you’ve got the stair. It says, “In case of fire, door will release.” Well, okay. So then evidently I’m not supposed to use that stairwell on a normal basis.
Obstacles to Navigation
I love these pictures (slides 5 – 7), because I’ve worked in places like that and have unfortunately been forced to design places like that when there’s no budget and I’m reusing existing furniture and repurposing an existing space to put things into.
Cubical Layouts
But in a space like the one on the left (slide 5), where [compared to] the one on the right, you have an absence of color and shadow. It’s a sea of cubicles; a cubicle farm, as one of my friends call it. There’s no way to navigate those spaces.
You look for things -- like, in the very back of the [right] picture[ in slide 5], somebody has a potted plant on their overhead, and you look for that potted plant as a way of orienting yourself in that office space. So cubicles and things that are not fixed architecture can be just as big a problem to navigate as other options.
Furniture in Space with Clutter
This (slide 6) is a blowup of a plan from, like, a 1940s or ‘50s German office building. This was the idea of an open office plan where you could be flexible and you could be within reach of all the pieces that you needed, and someone else could be off over in their own world. But this creates spatial clutter. Freestanding furniture is going to be just as much an issue to navigate through as the architectural walls and the space.
Floor Naming and Numbering
This is a little abstract one, but if you look at those elevator buttons, whether you’re in a building in San Francisco and you come in on the east side of the building and it’s Floor Level One; you come in on the west side of the building and the road slopes, and you’re now in B- 2.
So how do you know what floor you’re really on? How do you orient yourself within that building? We have no system that says, “Here’s how to number a building.” There are certain conventional standards, but there’s nothing that says, “This is the best-practices way to do it.” And you could confuse people between M for Main, L for Lobby, 1 for first floor. Well, in some cases, you’re -- for example, one is actually the second level above ground. How do you name them? How do you number them?
The numbering system, too, when you’re looking at a plan, an architectural drawing -- I’ve been part of projects where they’ve laid a grid over the floor plan, and the upper left corner is one and the lower right corner is 100, and we do a left to right down the grid. And that’s how they number buildings.
Comment by [Participant]: In defense of architects, that should change when the signage comes through, to be logical.
Response by Erin Schambureck: I hope so. It’s meant to be for the mechanical systems and labeling those into the AC systems and [other construction coordination]
Comment by [Participant]: It should never be the numbering system afterwards.
Response by Erin Schambureck: But it gets done. So looking more intuitively at how we number a building, can we come up with a better process for that?
Protruding Objects
We do have some guidelines in the ADA about where you can protrude objects into a hallway, but we don’t necessarily say that the objects protruding need to be of contrasting colors. So you may miss the object or you may not even see it altogether.
Comment by [Participant]: Well, that standard was specifically written to address people using a cane.
Response by Erin Schambureck: A cane, right.
Comment by Participant]: Essentially, the 27 inches is a magic number where [the cane of] an average-height person will intersect with the object, giving that user sufficient stopping time to avoid the object.
Comment by Participant]: So there’s nothing for people with low vision.
Response by Erin Schambureck: Exactly.
Comment by Marsha Mazz: And, in fact, if it’s below 27 inches, it’s not a “protruding object.” So for those of us with low vision, you’re more likely to walk into it, exactly. So again, it’s a situation where we addressed a problem for one user group, but it doesn’t in any way imply that another user group is [accommodated].
Question by Erin Schambureck: So is there a way that we could address “protruding objects” and modify the language in some way that would make it more universally friendly?
Response by [Participant]: The state of California attempted to address that by requiring what are known as detectable warnings, the bumps on the curb ramps, underneath drinking fountains.
Question by [Participant]: Did it work?
Response by [Participant]: Well, using detectable warnings to mark protruding objects would dilute their effectiveness to signal that we’re about to enter traffic. People come up with good ideas, but sometimes, they’re not as well thought out as we’d like them to be.
Disorienting Spaces (slide 7)
These are two images from the [research] project that Dennis talked about yesterday, where they were analyzing interior spaces that visually say one thing but really mean another.
In the [photo] on the left, which is from the Bellagio [Hotel in Las Vegas, this is a reflective glass wall next to the two gentlemen. It looks like there’s four people standing there. There’s actually only two. And the flooring pattern is such that there’s a little offset, but it continues on in through the glass. I would walk into that wall.
You know, it’s hard to tell. If you imagine Las Vegas lighting, it’s a lot of really warm lights and it’s a very uniform – (background noise) – of color temperature of light. There’s not a lot of distinguishing [features]. It is all just sort of orangy, runs together, very disastrous design change.
[In the photo] on the right, it looks like steps. It’s not. It’s actually a flat surface, and then going into the lovely, also very easy-to-navigate checkerboard flooring pattern. So we’re creating in an idea something that was supposed to identify what is probably an elevator lobby, but it’s creating navigation difficulties.
Use color and design to create architectural landmarks to aid in spatial orientation (slides 8 – 10)
We can use color and texture to facilitate wayfinding. We talked yesterday that thinking about it in terms of gray scale. For example, in the space on the left [in slide 8], there’s a color definition behind the main reception desk. Now, yes, there’s a lot of glare in this space. It was an east-facing wall looking over the Mississippi River. But there is some sense of [orientation] of where you go when you need to find information and also spatial orientation.
Then also, looking at vertical wayfinding, where you’ve got a set of stairs [right photo in slide 8], the same color continues up, denotes that spot on the plan where you are. Using those things on a larger scale can help people navigate vertically through a building and then also horizontally [in those areas].
Again [slide 9, left photo], color denotes areas of plan. We’ve got a glass wall in front of the YMCA building that continues the entire length of the building, and they’re denoting where that entrance is with a large red stripe. This is where you’re supposed to go to get in.
And then the same thing on the floor-plan signage [slide 9, right photo]. We’ve got different areas of the floor plan highlighted in colors on the map. To the right of that and cut off the [slide] is the list of departments and a dot with the corresponding color to the location on the map. And then throughout that building, the signage corresponded to the location on the map. So if you were in the orange section, all of the signage in that section had a little orange square on it to help you continue your spatial orientation.
And I changed [slide 10] so that this is actually another point that it’s going to make it easier to navigate a building if the main circulation paths on different floors are similar. This plan shows Level One on the left and Level Two on the right. And I purposely gray-scaled Level Two after our conversation yesterday about “can we make it [signage] universal for color deficiencies.”
For the most part, it works. You can’t tell the difference between the gray on the righthand floor plan and the green on the left. The purple and the red are pretty similar, but they’re far enough away that it’s not as confusing. I was more concerned that the blue and the purple might end up being the same gray-scale value.
Avoid the extremes of surface reflectivity and contrast (slides 11 and 13)
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.
Audible Information Systems (slide 14)
We can add more audible information. This is a quick graphic of a talking signage system. There’s more research that could be done in adding talking signage. We were working, talking to the U of M folks about – they’re developing a 2-D bar-code system that would go with a hand-held. A low-vision person would wave the hand-held piece back and forth. It would pick up that bar code.
There’s a distance delay of about three feet right now, so you’re actually [be] three feet past the sign before it transmits to a Blue Tooth phone or earpiece that tells you what that sign was that you just passed and what it says. And you can tell it that you want more information.
There’s technology coming out that can be incorporated in specific instances to help you navigate –3-D maps, hand-held.
Location of overhead signage (slide 15)
We can have this wonderful overhead signage, but we also need to have the signage closer to the eye level. The bring it closer and easier-to-read concept. Overhead signage is great for navigating wayfinding; make sure [that it] also [is] at a large scale [and] at a lower level that people can get close to it and really figure out what that sign says; [and] repeat signage.
Implementation Challenges for Interiors (slides 16 and 17)
And then just some different thoughts for how we’re going to implement [these solutions].
Prescriptive requirements are great, [if they are] backed by research, but that also may limit the design creativity and options and force someone to design something somewhere that may not [have] the best [performance]. Every scenario is different, so how do we allow for any unique situations for design?
Items that we can work on in the ADA [include]:
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Detectable warnings. Can we bring that into the building somehow and require that strip at every stair in an egress stairwell?
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Protruding objects. How can we improve that so that [protrusions] are not such obstacles?
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Improving egress signage?
Comments by [three Participants]: There’s one other aspect of the detectable warnings that people don’t think about. In the past, [we] have been required to have truncated cones covering the entire surface. For someone in a wheelchair, that is literally hell. And you’ve got to get back up and get out of the street. Exactly. So that’s a really bad idea.
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