Towards an Accessible City: Removing Functional Barriers to Independent Travel for Blind and Vision Impaired Residents and Visitors

The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the data presented herein. The contents do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the State of California. This report does not constitute a standard, specification, or regulation. administration and staff of the Santa Barbara MTD terminal and the various bus drivers who so courteously allowed us to intrude on their daily activities. We also acknowledge the valuable assistance of David and Daniel Steed and Ward Bond of Talking Signs® Incorporated for their support in obtaining equipment and in helping to obtain permission to use the MTD facilities for these experiments. I Executive Summary This study examined the effect that use of Remote Infrared Signage Systems (in particular the Talking Signs ®-TS ®-product) has on performance of blind or vision impaired people when undertaking a variety of bus user tasks. These tasks included finding a suburban bus stop, identifying a specific bus and boarding it, disembarking at the downtown terminal and finding the entrance, traversing the terminal and learning the location of facilities located therein, and, simulating the exiting of a bus, navigating through the terminal, exiting via a different door and searching for the boarding area of an express bus about 120' away on the frontal street, (the bus transfer task). Twenty-seven participants were divided into two groups, one of which used TS ® first on specific trials for each task, while the other group did not use TS ® on the first trial of those tasks. Our hypotheses predicted significant response time (RT) reduction when using TS ® plus higher success rates and fewer errors. It was also hypothesized that perceived stress, anxiety and difficulty of tasks would be reduced when using TS ® , while perceived independence would be increased. T-tests on the Response Time differences between use of TS ® and non-TS ® trials emphatically supported our hypotheses. With TS ® all tasks were completed quickly, independently, and successfully. Without the use of TS ® participants sometimes failed to complete tasks in the allotted time, gave up, or in some cases had completion times 4 or 5 times longer than the TS ® aided times. In the real world, this would have meant that some participants would not have been able to identify a stop or the relevant bus, would not have been …