scholarly journals Evaluation of the Visually Impaired Experience of the Sound Environment in Urban Spaces

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sen Zhang ◽  
Ke Zhang ◽  
Meng Zhang ◽  
Xiaoyang Liu

Visually impaired people have unique perceptions of and usage requirements for various urban spaces. Therefore, understanding these perceptions can help create reasonable layouts and construct urban infrastructure. This study recruited 26 visually impaired volunteers to evaluate 24 sound environments regarding clarity, comfort, safety, vitality, and depression. This data was collected in seven different types of urban spaces. An independent sample non-parametric test was used to determine the significance of the differences between environmental evaluation results for each evaluation dimension and to summarize the compositions of sound and space elements in the positive and negative influence spaces. The results suggested that visually impaired people (1) feel comfort, safety, and clarity in parks, residential communities, and shopping streets; (2) have negative perceptions of vegetable markets, bus stops, hospitals, and urban departments; (3) feel anxious when traffic sounds, horn sounds, manhole cover sounds, and construction sounds occur; and (4) prefer spaces away from traffic, with fewer and slower vehicles, with a suitable space scale, and moderate crowd density. These results provide a reference for the future design of activity venues (i.e., residential communities, vegetable markets, bus stops, parks, shopping streets, hospitals, and urban functional departments) and the planning of accessibility systems for visually impaired urban residents.

Author(s):  
Tiziana Campisi ◽  
Matteo Ignaccolo ◽  
Giuseppe Inturri ◽  
Giovanni Tesoriere ◽  
Vincenza Torrisi

CICTP 2020 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ammar Muhammad ◽  
Qizhou Hu ◽  
Muhammad Tayyab ◽  
Yikai Wu ◽  
Muhammad Ahtsham

Author(s):  
Olga Novikova ◽  

The special library acts as the cultural and educational center for visually impaired people, and as the center for continuing education. The multifunctional performance of the library is substantiated. The joint projects accomplished in cooperation with theatres and museums and aimed at integrating the visually impaired people into the society are described. Advanced training projects for the library professionals accomplished in 2018 are discussed.


Author(s):  
Heather Tilley ◽  
Jan Eric Olsén

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (03) ◽  
pp. 515-520
Author(s):  
Vattumilli Komal Venugopal ◽  
Alampally Naveen ◽  
Rajkumar R ◽  
Govinda K ◽  
Jolly Masih

Author(s):  
Kavita Pandey ◽  
Dhiraj Pandey ◽  
Vatsalya Yadav ◽  
Shriya Vikhram

Background: According to the WHO report, around 4.07% of the world's population is visually impaired. About 90% of the visually impaired users live in the lower economic strata. In the fast moving technology, most of the invention misses the need of these people. Mainly the technologies were designed for mainstream people; visually impaired people always find an inability to access it. This inability arises primarily for reasons such as cost, for example, Perkins Brailler costs 80-248 dollars for the simple purpose of Braille input. Another major reason is the hassle of carrying the big equipment. Objective: Keeping all this in mind and making technology as their best friends, MAGIC-1 has been designed. The goal is to provide a solution in terms of an application, which helps the visually impaired user in their daily life activities. Method: The proposed solution assists visually impaired users through smart phone technology. If visually impaired users ever wished to have a touched guide into a smart phone, MAGIC-1 has the solution that consolidates all the important features in their daily activities. Results: The performance of the solution as a whole and its individual features in terms of usability, utility and other metrics, etc. has been tested with sample visually impaired users. Moreover, their performances in term of Errors per Word and Words per Minute have been observed. Conclusion: MAGIC-I, the proposed solution works as an assistant of visually impaired users to overcome their daily struggles and stay more connected to the world. A visually impaired user can communicate via their mobile devices with features like eyes free texting using braille, voice calling etc. They can easily take help in an emergency situation with the options of SOS emergency calling and video assistance.


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