All around Britain, you will find this: tactile paving.
It’s to help blind and partially sighted people find their way around.
And here is the clever part,
and the part that almost everyone who is fully sighted will never have noticed:
there are different patterns for different situations.
Very few people see nothing at all.
That’s important to say. Only about 3%.
Some people have light perception, some people have a bit more vision.
Some people have a limited field of vision.
Some people have poor central vision but good peripheral vision.
Essentially, you think of partially sighted people with enough vision
to be able to get around safely and independently,
blind being below that threshold.
Dots in a grid, like this, mean a dropped kerb for crossing the road.
If it’s red, or at least, if it’s supposed to be red,
it’s a crossing with lights or something else to stop traffic:
these designs are for partially sighted people too,
so bright contrasting colours are a good idea.
There is a small amount of tactile paving here, used as a marker,
to flag up where the crossing is.
And then near the road, it’s for the full length of the crossing,
so you can work out where it is.
And it’s important to balance marking the crossing
against not using too much tactile paving:
because someone with arthritis can find surfaces like this painful to cross.
Navigating around an unfamiliar area is always a bit scary, to be honest.
Because, obviously, traditional visual clues, landmarks etc, aren't there.
It helps a lot if clues are consistent,
so confusion can certainly occur when that isn’t the case.
It’s very, very important that these adaptations that are there to help us
are actually there to help us
and are actually there in the way that we expect to see them.
But there are other patterns too.
Offset dots mean there’s a train platform ahead, a big chasm you could fall into.
Lozenge shapes mean a tram platform,
something closer to street level that could run you over.
Stripes across the path mean there’s some steps ahead,
or a couple of other things that could trip you up.
Stripes along the path mean a safe route to follow.
And if there’s a path that’s half for foot traffic, and half for bicycles?
Well, the direction of the stripes tells you which side is which.
Boroughs in London, councils outside of London,
seem to be moving more towards aesthetic considerations,
i.e. they’re changing the colour to darker greys so it blends in more.
By definition if it blends in more,
it’s harder for partially sighted people such as myself to actually see.
Or obviously, in a more dire situation,
people can find themselves in the road, not knowing they’re in the road,
simply because those essential clues aren’t there.
And sure, all this is tricky to get right.
The design standards for how this is laid down are literally a hundred pages long.
But so are the design standards for everything about public infrastructure:
having reliable rules that everyone understands is important
when there are tons of metal speeding past you.
Thank you very much to the team from the Royal National Institute of Blind People for all their help!
You can check out their YouTube channel here,
and yes, I have linked the full hundred-page design document in the description!