Perceptions of sounding or silent objects’ existence by visually impaired people in their daily life

Visually impaired people have difficulties in perceiving environmental information including the size of a space and the presence of objects, by means of visual information. Particularly, auditory-trained visually impaired people can recognize 3-D spatial information by means of environmental sounds. However, a systematic learning method of auditory spatial perception for walking training has not been sufficiently established because of insufficient information regarding visually impaired people’s movement in the real environment; most acquire this ability through practical experience. In this report, the authors aimed at demonstrating the mobility of visually impaired people, for example, which acoustical factors can be used in some living situations and in what kind of environmental situations do they find it difficult to perceive silent objects. Results indicated the following facts: Totally visually impaired people tend to get more spatial information from auditory cues than do not-totally visually impaired people. Regarding available auditory cues, items of rotating the head in order to listen carefully to environmental sounds, and hitting floors forcefully with a white cane or foot to increase the volume of reflected or reverberated sounds were the cues most often selected by the totally visually impaired participants who can perceive obstacles with auditory information.