SEEING THE ENVIRONMENT FROM THE EYE OF BLINDS

Abstract

Blind people perceive space with their heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch focusing exclusively on non-visual constituents of space. Everybody perceive space multidimensionally however blind people are more conscientious of the non-visual constituents of space. There is an extensive amount of research on mobility, perception, and wayfinding of blind people (Gaunet and Briffault, 2005; Saerberg, 2010; Passini and Proulx, 1988; Leonard and Newman, 1967; Dodds et al., 1982, Herman et al., 1983), however, there are fewer work showing which aspects of built environment they focus on and they use as cues in relating to the spatial environment. The study highlights the holistic and multidimensional perception of space by asking blind people to mark those places that they find particularly important in complex urban environments by verbally describing the features in the environment they attend to. Their verbal reports are recorded during wayfinding process. Decoding is made according to egocentric (memory) and environment based (sensory) inputs of environment that they mention. The study was conducted with 7 blind participants of whom three are congenitally blind in the Kemeralti District in İzmir, which is a complex urban environment. The district provides rich sensory information for blind people in the form of non-visual sensory inputs. It is found that holistic perception of the urban environment has great significance for blind people and the multidimensional sensory inputs help them in their wayfinding strategies in a complex environment.

Keywords: Blindness, Sense, Multidimensional Perception, Complex Urban Environment