Essay On Vision And Blindness

The built environment is experienced with all our senses; however, the other senses are not taken into consideration as much as vision does. Vision is said to be the spatial sense par excellence (Foulke, 1983) and the very medium in which designers, architects and others, would use to think and design with (Cross, 1982). This creates an environment that focuses heavily on vision, and those who are impaired will find themselves excluded and not taken into as much consideration as they should be. The ideal environment would be one that is inclusive, giving people of different sensory capabilities the ability to easily navigate and experiences spaces.

Visual Impairment is used to describe a state of any kind of vision loss. The leading causes of low vision and blindness are most often age related eye diseases – macular degeneration, cataract, and glaucoma. Injury on the eye or on the head may also lead to vision loss, other conditions that may cause vision loss after birth include amblyopia, diabetic retinopathy, and trachoma. There are also those who are visually impaired at birth - called congenital

Due to their inability to use visual cues and signs, alternate sensory inputs are used and these are auditory, tactile, and proprioception. A common strategy is to identify landmarks and form a mental map. Other strategies include a recall of these mental maps, systematic familiarization, and soliciting assistance. There are several ways in which the visually impaired can navigate through a space, one is by way of echolocation, detecting objects by listening to the echoes produced after making bursts of sound (Thaler, 2011). Tactile perception, as a means of landmark, can also be used by the blind to move in an area, in fact this is the sense that most visually impaired people develop better first. Lowenfield has