blind demographics

There are four levels of visual function:

_normal vision

_moderate visual impairment

_severe visual impairment

_blindness.

Statistics:


_About 314 million people are visually impaired worldwide, 45 million of them are blind.

_Most people with visual impairment are older

_Females are more at risk at every age in every part of the world

_About 87% of the world's visually impaired live in developing countries.

_The number of people blinded by infectious diseases has been greatly reduced, but age-related impairment is increasing.

_About 82% of all people who are visually impaired are age 50 and older (although they represent only 19% of the world's population).

Resources:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs282/en/

architecture for the visually impaired

how does a blind person perceive architecture? 


_Through touching things and asking what colour they are


_The blind can hear how spacious an area is or how deep it is or if it has windows


_They can feel wind coming in through doors or windows


_The acoustics in a room or outside has a lot to do with our perception of a space


_The bind have to process what they hear, smell and feel into mental images of what is seen with the visual sense.


_Keep doors either wide opened or totally closed


_Those who are blind get motion sickness easier due to the fact of all the information coming into our brain to process and sort


_The more crowded an area is the more the more blind people want to get away because they can hear and smell everything.


_Open space gives the blind a sense of freedom and on the other hand it can be too noisy


_Sound is a primary source of a blind persons world


_Inside rock walls tend to muffle the sound which doesn't help


_Brick is better than rock walls


_High ceilings make the rooms sound huge


_Wood paneling seems to hold the noise out


_Rooms that aren't too small are preferred as they do not feel restricting 


_Blind people prefer walls with texture because then they can feel it and get a sense of what it looks like through touch


_Lighting is very important when designing for the visually impaired. Depending on the person - too much light can hurt and not enough makes it too dark. 


_Fluorescent lights are glaring and annoying


_In a utopia every building would have a plaque describing the building for us


_Contrast is very important


_The blind can sense the size of the building from outside by hearing the wind blowing off and around it. A blind person can also sense little crevices and hallows of a building.


_Smooth glass and steel are not ideal materials as they sound very hallow and cold.

_Landmarks are important to know where they are and what is where. 

_Large windows can creak loudly and are just another noise the blind have to process.

               _anonymous

Dark Restaurants

'It's more of an event rather than a restaurant. It's a theatrical experience.'
- PAUL FARRAH, theatre producer


Dans le Noir?

Dans Le Noir? is co-funded by the Paul Guinot Foundation for Blind people and is staffed completely by the visually impaired. Dans le Noir?? allows you to completely re-evaluate the notion of taste.
 Without sight, other senses are offered a new sensation and emotions.
 Darkness leads to truthfulness about taste, kills preconceptions and let you face the realities of ingredients and cuisine. Our chef elaborates a refined and sensorial cuisine with fresh ingredients to help our senses to enjoy the “truth” taste of food.

Dining in the total darkness represents a very unusual social experience. The absence of vision changes completely the way you act and react, both emotionally and socially. That’s why Dans le Noir? is far more than just a restaurant: it offers a social and convivial experience. Dans le Noir ? raises some questions such as the role of sight in the way we relate to others.

In the dark room, you are guided and served by our blind staff.
 A magic switch between sighted and blind people happens. For once, blind people actually become your eyes.
 This reversal of roles implies a transfer of trust from the sighted person to the blind guide because without him we are just lost. Who actually feels the most Dans le Noir??
 The experience is emotionally strong and this empathy really encourages mutual trust and respect.

There is a surprise menu to give the diners the additional excitement of trying to guess what exactly they are eating. Apparently this is where the Dans le Noir? experience leaves something to be desired. Whether this is due to the diner's inability to see the food or the chef's inability to make something that tastes good, even in the dark, is up for debate.

The first Dans le Noir restautant opened in 2004 in Paris. There are Dans le Noir? restaurants in London and in Moscow, and another company called "Blackout" has just opened an all-blind-waitstaff restaurant in Tel-Aviv, next door to the "Kappish" cafe, whose waitstaff is all-deaf: On the table at Kappish is a sheet with instructions on how to order in sign language.


The restaurant has a special security system and clearly indicated emergency exits.

Speaking recently to Anatolia news agency, Maite Sutto, owner of Dans Le Noir that opened in Barcelona on Dec. 31 last year, said: “This is more than a restaurant. There is a social and humanistic experience. People come here for a new tasting experience but leave here with a humanistic experience.”

Stating that the difficulties of working conditions were easily overcome thanks to the beauty of the project, Maite said they found their staff with the help of the Association for the Blind and that they offered them all their legal benefits.

Although customers chose their menu before entering the dark dining room, he said they did not know what they were being served during the dinner.

References:

http://atlasobscura.com/place/dans-le-noir

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=dans-le-noir-eating-in-pitch-darkness-2010-05-20

http://travel.spotcoolstuff.com/unusual-restaurants-eating-in-the-dark

http://www.danslenoir.com/

Braille Graffiti

Most braille found in public exists as pragmatic directions. This project is an attempt to create a unique moment for a blind person who might happen across one of these bits of braille graffiti. 5 different phrases were peppered around Portland, Oregon in late August, 2007. The visible title is included in an attempt to draw attention to all who pass making it more likely for a blind person to come in contact with the words via suggestion from friends or passersby. This was a strategy that arose in an interview with a blind person who wished to remain anonymous.


One sentence reads: You don't have to be blind to see that the writing is on the wall.
Another: Tiny bubbles that randomly rose from the paper in this arrangement.



References:


http://www.39forks.com/39pages/projects/BrailleGraffiti/BrailleGraffiti.htm

Braille Wellington

Anton Parsons - Invisible City 2003

Dimensions: H 2200mm, W 1200mm

Location:  Corner of Lambton Quay and Grey Street

Tactile: it is made to be touched. 

Surface: Invisible City is polished stainless steel, and reflects its surroundings. When looking at it you see a reflection of Wellington.

Sited on the corner of Grey Street and Lambton Quay, Invisible City is a Braille sculpture: two gleaming vertical stainless steel slabs, angled obliquely to one another, with Braille lettering described in French boule-sized hemispheres. The work is by sculptor Anton Parsons; the Braille text by writer and academic Associate Professor (Massey University) Peter Beatson.

For Dr. Beatson the sculpture has a special significance; the poem Invisible City arrayed in large Braille letters is in part an epitaph to his second guide dog, Paisley, who died prematurely in 2001. Dr Beatson began to go blind during his childhood and has been totally blind since his mid-30s. Ziggy, his current guide dog, is his third.

The poem Invisible City is far darker, expressing something of Dr Beatson’s grief at Paisley’s death, which had occurred just days before Parsons invited his collaboration. The poem, says Dr Beatson, was a form of catharsis.

“Paisley’s is the ‘graven seed’, I suppose you could say,” says Dr Beatson. The poem is also dense with other allusions.

“At another level you can also see the poem as being about how lonely blind people can feel in a big city,” he said. “Particularly in Wellington where the wind so easily destroys the sounds that cue you in to where you are.”

For most people the poem Invisible City will itself be invisible. Few sighted people know Braille, and the slabs and the Braille letters are too large to be easily read, even by the blind.

“I suppose it is fitting that the poem does not assert its presence. But I’d like people to know that there is more to the sculpture than meets the eye. It’s fun to know something more, and I’d like to think Paisley is being remembered.”

INVISIBLE CITY
The word made flesh can bleed.
Am I bound or freed?
Embracing visual silence alone
I breed a virtual skin of signs
across the void
but when the fault line ruptures
the word made flesh will bleed.
By the unseen quay
I plant this graven seed
betrayed by the wind
my sonic charts destroyed
tethered sign to skin
I am both bound and freed.




Other Braille works by Anton Parsons:

From Top left to bottom right: 

Gone Fishing 2002 - Fibreglass, polyurethane, paint

Located in the Price Waterhouse Coopers building, Auckland

Numbers 2007 - Anodised aluminium, vinyl 3200dia

Twin Infinities 2007 - Fibreglass, wood, arcylic, light 

1800x800x250mm each

There is a paradox to much of Parsons' work. On one hand, his pieces seem to confront the viewer with their large scale, bristling with information or getting in the way, but also offering emptiness. They are highly visible but encoded only for those without sight.

The text in Gone Fishing is so large it becomes unreadable, even to a blind person. And even a blind person with a ladder would have difficulty making sense of Invisible City, with its characters wrapping around all sides of the two stainless steel slabs, with no clue to where each line begins and ends.

"It's about how you see things and how you get information from things, and how some things in life are hidden from you," says Parsons of his sculptures' defiant muteness. "You never know quite how things work and then you'll never figure it out, maybe. Or you'll have a take on it but you might not get it right."

Invisible City and Gone Fishing both use texts written by blind poet and Massey lecturer Peter Beatson, who is also a trustee of the National Radio Reading Service.

One of Parsons' works at Roger Williams Contemporary is a Braille translation of an eye-test chart, which may seem contradictory and mean but, by overtly denying an easy reading, Parsons wants people to consider their own experience of the physicality of his works. By tantalising us with the suggestion of information without giving it away, we will pay more attention to the forms he uses.

His intentions may seem antagonistic but there is also a cosmic poetry in his work - of potentially saying a lot and yet saying nothing. His two-panel Braille piece Twin Infinities is made up of opposites - a black panel and a white panel; one with raised dots and the other concave. It is both positive and negative but combined it cancels itself out.

"There is every combination of numbers," he says, referring to one of his numbered works. "There is nothing really there because there are too many variables. So you get lost in this middle ground of having everything and nothing. Too much information gives you nothing.

References:


http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/2003/masseynews/june/june03/stories/beatson.html


http://www.sculpture.org.nz/engine/SID/10007/AID/1096.htm


http://tworooms.versionproductions.com/anton-parsons/?image=346


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts-literature/news/article.cfm?c_id=18&objectid=10397481

INITIAL BRIEF

TAKE A PERFORMANCE GENRE: restaurant/culinary space for the blind

CREATE AN INITIAL BRIEF: to create enriching culinary spaces for the visually impaired. This is done through consideration of tactility, touch, smell, temperature, sound and new technologies.

WHAT ARE THE SPATIAL DYNAMICS AND HOW DO THEY INFORM STRUCTURE, MATERIALITY AND THE IMMATERIAL (LIGHT, SOUND, ATMOSPHERE): having separate free flowing rooms differentiated by various floor materials (e.g., carpet, tile, wooden, cork, concrete). The sounds produced by walking on and also by interaction with the materials will help the blind to realise they are in a different space – a different course of the meal. By taking out a sense (vision) the atmosphere of a space totally changes.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY AND SYSTEMS: sound systems play an important role. Braille is an important component.

HOW ARE THE SENSES ENGAGED AND EXPERIENCE SHAPED: 

Performers: the kitchen staff creating sounds, smells, tastes and textures.

Audience: the blind that come to experience a culinary event with just four senses.

WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS SPACES FOR...

FRONT OF HOUSE: eating space or a space to read menu

BACK OF HOUSE: kitchen

THE PERFORMERS: multi–room/spaces for multi courses

HOW DO THE VARIOUS ZONES SEPARATE OR INTERSECT: through the use of other senses touch, smell, taste and sound. Through barrier free and free flowing spaces. Through changes in materiality especially floor surfaces, changes in illumination, changes in temperature, changes in sound, changes in textures 

WHAT IS HIDDEN AND WHAT IS REVEALED: sight is hidden. sound. taste. touch. smell is revealed.

Sculpture Relief Depicting Christ Healing the Blind Man

SACRED NATURE: Thoughts on including/bringing in the sacred history of the building. 

Bible passages relating to food and also the blind:

The last supper: Matthew 26:26-28

As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, "Take this and eat it, for this is my body." And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them and said, "Each of you drink from it, for this is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and his people. It is poured out as a sacrifice to forgive the sins of many.

Blind: Isaiah 29:9

Be stunned and amazed, blind yourselves and be sightless; be drunk, but not from wine, stagger, but not from beer.

Blind: Isaiah 42:16

I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.

Blind: John 9:39

Jesus said, "For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind."

The Last Supper - Leonardo Da Vinci 1495-1498

INITIAL Research:

Details

As vision is most peoples’ dominant sense, our environment is keyed to visual orientation and communication. Planning for visually impaired and blind people therefore means rethinking familiar everyday rituals. Visually impaired people encounter barriers that would never occur to someone with normal sight. Visually impaired and blind people have to construe the overall context from details, whereas sighted people are aware of the overall context first and the details second.

Design

"Just because a person can't see doesn't mean design doesn't matter, it simply means the design has to be more specific. A well designed space sounds nice, it feels nice. The way sound moves through it the way air moves through it all become very important."

Michael Moloney 

Sound

Mary Loeffelhoz cannily identifies the container of the house as an ear "a permeable but protective boundary organ." Loeffelholz reads the Dickinson Homestead as a sensory structure that continually channels and returns sound. As a sensitive medium of sound, the house-lyre embodies for Dickinson "a poetic model of perception and reception." Sound succeeds where sight fails, passing through windows and doors, penetrating walls and floors, infiltrating corners and crannies.

Unlike the body's other orifices, the ear is the only organ that cannot close itself. The portals of the ear remain perpetually open, capable at any time of receiving messages from a world beyond the bounds of the strictly visible. The ear's receptivity makes it the most vulnerable of human orifices, and the most finely tuned. It is the ear, not the eye, that offers the most direct route to the human heart.

Invoking the nineteenth-century belief that hearing is the last of the corporeal senses to fade upon the demise, Dickinson notes that "The ear is the last face. We hear after we see."

References:

Fuss, D. (2004). The sense of an interior: four writers and the rooms that shaped them. London, Great Britain: Routledge.

Skiba, I & Zuger, R.(2009). Barrier free planning. Germany: Birkhauser.

What is blindness?

Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception. Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness. Total blindness is the complete lack of form and visual light perception and is clinically recorded as NLP, an abbreviation for "no light perception." Blindness is frequently used to describe severe visual impairment with residual vision. Those described as having only light perception have no more sight than the ability to tell light from dark and the general direction of a light source. In order to determine which people may need special assistance because of their visual disabilities, various governmental jurisdictions have formulated more complex definitions referred to as legal blindness. 

In North America and most of Europe, legal blindness is defined as visual acuity (vision) of 20/200 (6/60) or less in the better eye with best correction possible. This means that a legally blind individual would have to stand 20 feet (6.1 m) from an object to see it—with corrective lenses-with the same degree of clarity as a normally sighted person could from 200 feet (61 m). In many areas, people with average acuity who nonetheless have a visual field of less than 20 degrees (the norm being 180 degrees) are also classified as being legally blind. Approximately ten percent of those deemed legally blind, by any measure, have no vision. The rest have some vision, from light perception alone to relatively good acuity. Low vision is sometimes used to describe visual acuities from 20/70 to 20/200.

Color Blindness

Colour Blindness is sometimes characterized as a disability, color blindness can be caused by a number of things such as nerve damage, genetics, and in some cases, exposure to certain types of chemicals. The most common type of color blindness is individuals not being able to distinguish between red and green colors. Having this disability can cause problems in ones daily activities. For instance, driving can be an issue, when stopping at traffic light and waiting on the red and green lights. The simple task of cooking can become an issue as well, not being able to know if any types of meat you are cooking is completely done.

Night Blindness

Also known as Nyctalopia, is when someone has difficulty seeing in dim light. This type of blindness can be caused by the lack of vitamin A or the retinitis pigmentosa, which is where the rod cells in the retina begin to loose the ability to respond to light. Also, night blindness can be caused by an injury or it can be present at birth. 

What is Braille?

Braille is a system of reading and writing that uses embossed dots. Braille characters are formed by using different combinations of six dots. These dots are arranged in a pattern called a Braille cell which is two dots across and three dots down. Louis Braille, who was French, invented this system of dots in 1824 when he was just 15 years old.

Touch and your fingertips

The hand is the organ devoted to touch. Touch can be sensed all over the body, but the real tact is concentrated in the hand and fingers, which move over an object to determine its volume, temperature, and nature. The fingers of man have epidermal and dermal folds, which we call the fingerprint. These fingerprints are unique to each individual, and allow an increase in the surface area of the skin at the ends of the fingers greatly raising the number of sensory receptors present. The hand is also an organ, which allows us to communicate. Deaf-mutes employ a sign language using their hands the blind read Braille with their fingertips.

The visually impaired reader moves his fingers over the paper, detecting the points standing out in relief, and associates a combination of points with a letter then a word. The blind are capable of reading 150 words per minute (300 to 1,000 words per minute for sighted person).
The threshold of sensitivity of the skin corresponds exactly to the dimensions of a Braille character. The sensitivity of an organ is defined by the sensitivity threshold to a mechanical stimulation (entry of a point to a depth of 6 µm) and the spatial discrimination threshold (separation measured with dividers). Lowest thresholds occur at the tip of the tongue and on the fingertips (1-3 mm). The fingers have a very high density of touch receptors, which has led to an over-representation of the fingers in the somato-sensory cortex. The threshold of sensitivity of the skin corresponds exactly to the dimensions of a Braille character. The detection of Braille characters depends entirely on Merkel cells and Meissner corpuscles. Merkel cells, which are stimulated by angles, points and curves, provide the spatial characteristics of the Braille symbols, while Meissner corpuscles supply the temporal information. Because of the discrimination threshold, a Braille character is 4 mm x 6 mm, thus an A4 Braille page (21 X 29.7) only contains 27 lines of 30 Braille characters. A Braille book thus occupies 3 to 6 times more volume than the same document in normal script. 

Blind dining a culinary experience

Blindfolds and braille aren't things you may normally associate with dining out but a culinary event with a twist is part of this year's New Zealand International Science Festival – and organisers hope guests will leave with more than just a satisfied hunger. Guests are blindfolded, the menus are in brail, as science festival organisers hope to tempt the tastebuds and stimulate the senses. Julie Biusos created the dining in the dark menu and says presentation is usually a key ingredient in her job but with blindfolded diners there are other things to consider.

"It's quite a challenge to think beyond that square; of course I've had to make sure no accidents nothings going to end up in the lap," Ms Biuso says.

And to dine, blind isn’t just a challenge for the menu designer. If they are finding the whole thing a bit hard to swallow it's a daily experience for chef Julie Woods who has been visually impaired to for 13 years. Not that it has slowed her down in the kitchen; instead Julie Wood now relies heavily on touch.

"I can tell when chickens cooked because the skin gets touch of you can identify where objects are in the kitchen by their shape of by what's left on the bench so there's a lot of information that you use by your sense of touch," Ms Woods says.

Ms Biuso hope to give diners more that just fine food to chew on.

"We do take things for granted and so it'll make them a little more understanding of people who can't see."

A sense blind diners may appreciate a little more.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2797678/different_types_of_blindness.html?cat=5

http://www.rnzfb.ord.nz/learn/accessible-information/braille

http://www.skin-science.com