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ICMEAS 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 280 (2017) 012047 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/280/1/012047
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Research on the Design of Visually Impaired Interactive

Accessibility in Large Urban Public Transport System

Weiru Zhang1,*
1
Wuhan University of Technoogy No. 122 Luoshi Road, Hongshan district, Wuhan,
Hubei Province

*Wangn_rur@yeah.net

Abstract. In medieval times, due to people’s reliance on belief, public space of

Christianity came into being. With the rise of secularization, religion gradually turned
into private belief, and accordingly public space returned to private space. In the 21st
century, due to people’s reliance on intelligent devices, information-interactive public
space emerges, and as information interaction is constantly constraining the visually
impaired, public space regressed to the exclusive space of limited people[1].
Modernity is marked by technical rationality, but an ensuing basic problem lies in the
separation between human action, ethics and public space. When technology fails to
overcome obstacles for a particular group, the gap between the burgeoning intelligent
phenomena and the increasing ratio of visually impaired is also expanding, ultimately
resulting in a growing number of “blind spots” in information-interactive space.
Technological innovation not only promotes the development of the information
industry, but also promotes the rapid development of the transportation industry.
Traffic patterns are diversifying and diverging nowadays, but it's a fatal blow for
people with visually disabilities, Because they still can only experience the most
traditional mode of transportation, sometimes even not go out. How to guarantee their
interactive accessibility in large urban public transport system right, currently, is a
very important research direction.

1. The Necessity of Concern for Information Interaction of the Blind

Interactive design has undergone only a few decades of development, which, however, is still
increasing at an astounding pace. Science and technology have boosted the development of design,
and promoted interactive design’s further innovation towards information interaction direction. In
2008, IBM’s CEO Peng Mingsheng first proposed the idea of “Smarter Planet”, which means to adopt
the new generation of information technology in combining the Internet with the Internet of things for
the sake of realizing the integration of human society and physical system. Numerous large cities are
also scrambling to join the ranks of smart city: “Data drives the world, software defines the world,
automation is taking over the world, and the construction of smarter cities will become a vital carrier
of the next wave to fuel IT world.[2]” The times are changing, whereas design is changing to change
people’s life, but there are actually a large number of people who haven’t felt excited about such
designs. In such a smart city, such urban public space, or even such public transportation system space,
the visually impaired in ever-increasing numbers, do not have access to the humane merits brought by

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ICMEAS 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 280 (2017) 012047 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/280/1/012047
1234567890

information interaction. The interaction of information, to a large extent, has left them out of account.
Especially in a disturbing environment beyond hearing aid’s availability, visual inability of the blind
tends to intensify the circumstance that they cannot smoothly experience the conveniences brought by
information interaction.

1.1. From the Perspective of Data

There is a depiction in the novel Blindness as follows: “As the amber light came on at a busy crossing,
one of the cars stopped, and the panic-stricken driver desperately waved his hands, screaming, “I am
blind! I am blind! I am blind!” Later, blindness spread rapidly, and the entire city plunged into an
unprecedented catastrophe”[3]. Although our real life is not as dramatic as a novel, blindness does
exist in the real world. A large number of references have cited the following data: “Dr. Thylefore,
planning director for WHO prevention of deafness and blindness in Geneva, states that, China is a
country with the most blind people in the world at 5 million or so, accounting for 18% of the world's
blind population, and around 450,000 people are born blind every year in China.” Such a huge number
was virtually the statistic ten years ago. The World Health Organization updated the data five years
later: In 2010, there are 8.288 million blind people, 67.24 million low-vision people, and 755.12
million people with visual impairment in China, which is the sum of the above two (see Figure 1)[4].
According to data graphs provided by ICEVI (see Figure 2), there are more than 6100 blind groups,
44,300 low-vision groups and 55,400 visually impaired groups out of every one million people in
China. To express it with more intuitive data: there is one blind person, five low-vision persons and
six visually impaired persons in every one hundred people.

Figure1.Visually impaired percentage by WHO

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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 280 (2017) 012047 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/280/1/012047
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Figure 2. Numbers of people visually impaired per million populations

Meanwhile, Dr. Thylefors stressed once again in 2010’s report, it is estimated that there are
450,000 people going blind each year in China, which indicates that there is a chance of blindness
almost every minute in China[5]. Although WHO does not offer the latest data, it is thus estimated that
the number of blind people in China will increase fourfold in 2020 at more than 50 million. Despite
the ever-developing modern technology, blindness has also been “spreading” as depicted in the novel.
The blind just can’t wait to count on designers to gradually discover their needs, but most stimulate
people’s pressing concern about the visually impaired in proportion to the increasing number. In the
era of information, the traditional way of interaction is gradually being replaced. A wide variety of
intelligent devices have unfolded a colorful world of interactive experience to sighted people, but still
leave endless darkness and helplessness to the visually impaired.

1.2 From the Perspective of Accessibility

According to Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis, the reason for contemporary design’s difficulty in drawing
public attention to the disadvantaged despite their freedom of choice, the disadvantaged in the present
context no longer possess that self-consciousness and sense of historical mission of the traditional
working class, hence unattractive to the intellectuals, who, though take pity on these people, have
always learned to restrain themselves and are reluctant to associate with the group and their misery[6].
Therefore, when an absolute interactive process hangs high over lives of the visually impaired,
interaction here will lose its bite. Homogeneity gradually erases the diversity of design, which is then
replaced by the philosophy of homogeneous universal design, and a convergence towards of
information which has blurred the public space of the large number of the tendency of blind. For
another simple example, public space of public transportation system in the 1980s was equipped with
staff specializing in selling tickets, and such pure human-human interactions, to some extent, can
better enhance the accessibility of interactive feedbacks from the visually impaired.

2. Interactive Space in Metropolis Public Transportation System under the Development of

Information Technology
The public traffic space discussed in this paper refers to the specific space provided by traffic
management, social development, technological progress and emergence of various traffic means for
these social activities after the formation of transportation system. Currently, the composition of urban
traffic means is divided into the following aspects (see Figure 3). Based on existing research on the
blind in the city, excluding subsidiary and special traffic means such as high-speed rail, ferry and
airplane, this paper has laid emphasis upon public transportation system space, metro system space
and individual traffic space (urban pedestrian space).

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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 280 (2017) 012047 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/280/1/012047
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Figure 3. Currently composition of urban traffic

The interaction in public traffic space can be defined in a broad or narrow sense: in the broad
sense, it refers to study on people’s psychology for the purpose of constructing a stable, operable
general environment and achieving the abstract nervous systematization of information exchanges and
communications for the blind. On the other hand, interactive space refers to narrow interactive space
of a variety of subsidiary functional zones, like the reception and waiting zone, which arises out of the
continuous development of information technology and personalized management on the basis of a
transportation system. The paper divides the representations of narrow public interactive space into the
following three types: ticketing space (including online ticket), waiting zone, and traffic means in
itself.

3. Classifications and Analysis of Interaction Modes of the Blind in Urban Public Transportation
System
Public space develops from simple human-human interaction to complex human-computer interaction.
When it comes to public space, interactive behaviors are no longer the aggregation of numerous
individuals but a hybrid space made up of all sorts of visual and auditory touch points. The birth of the
Internet in 1969 has launched the world's first deeply virtual public interactive space, and successfully
blocked the blind out. The emergence of intelligence has altered the definition of public space for the
blind and their cohesive relations with urban space. Catherine Grout describes modern public space in
her Pour de I' art dans notre quotidian: “Public space today is so instable and is always floating in an
unprecedented persistent state in absence of any sense of place.” The “lost space” arisen in modern
metropolises may slowly disappear with the isolation and rupture of interaction and sharing of public
space, and the same is true for traffic space [7]. With the concerted efforts of the urban wave of
information and the rise of data science, China is now vigorously advocating constructing smarter
cities, but if the essence of intelligence is not built upon bringing benefit to everyone, the overall
concept may seem increasingly implausible.

3.1 Interaction Accessibility in Individual Traffic Space

In the physical barrier of the visually impaired, the blind road becomes one of the most necessary
conditions for the blind. In 2015, one hot post on Weibo attracts people to pay great attention to blind
"Beijing blind road, why becomes “death road” (Figure 4). The normal way of interaction between the
blind and the blind road is terminated by all kinds of damages. In fact, China has the world's longest,
most widely distributed blind path in the world. Over the past 30 years, Beijing has more than 1,600

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IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 280 (2017) 012047 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/280/1/012047
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kilometers of blind facilities, But the visible or intangible obstacles still lie between the blind and the
outside world, there is no smooth interactive space for them at all. Through oral interviews with 50
normal vision groups, 90 percent said that they had never seen the blind walk on the road.

Figure 4. “Death road for the blind”

3.2 Interaction Accessibility in Public Traffic Space

App Smart Bus has changed the traditional operation mode of bus via utilizing advanced GPS
positioning technology, 3G communications technology, and GIS (Geographic Information System)
technology, and can intelligently arrange the operating vehicles by combining with the operation
characteristics of buses. People can track bus arrival at any time through the mobile App. As
intelligence has replaced manual work, the stop-reporting service of traditional ticket staff is
beingreplaced smart display screens at bus stops, but the visually impaired can neither send feedbacks
to the stop-reporting system on vehicles via listening in such a noisy environment nor know the exact
information of arriving buses via visually reading the smart screen, and Smart Bus on mobile also
lacks the function of voice stop reporting. It is not until May 2015 that the smart bus blind-aid system
was first promoted in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, which includes blind-aid control devices, bus
stop information, cloud bus information databases, cloud voice information databases and cloud
mapping data. This system can offer practical, effective blind-aid service for the visually impaired via
voice plus button interaction as well as cloud bus information in the system, but this system has
hitherto been popularized in only a few cities.

3.3 Interaction Accessibility in Metro Traffic Space

Metro station is a quite typical public transportation space with a large flow of people and a relatively
special space. First, unlike open space of bus stop, its space is rather confined; second, geographically
restricted by spatial distinctiveness, the special space and intelligent devices there have hindered
interactive behaviors of the visually impaired in taking metro. Barrier-free design for the visually
impaired in Japanese metro has effectively protected their interactive interests. At most metro exits,
due to the low-lying terrain, all the upper and lower staircase handrails are made in wavy shape (see
Figure 5), and each wave on the handrail matches up with a step, and there are corresponding braille
tips on each handrail at the turning point (see Figure 6).

Figure 5. Wavy shape of Handrail

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Figure 6. Braille tips on Handrail

Since the blind can recognize the whole metro platform space, in October 2014, several students of
Tongji University designed a tactile map for the blind: they adopted 3D tangible dot-line-plane
textured symbols to compose the map, in which blind tracks are represented by discontinuous dashed
lines, fare gate by two horizontal lines, and passengers’ direction by oblique arrow. It can realize the
intangible accessibility in the interaction process, and help the visually impaired grasp in-station
layout quickly.
The British charity Royal London Society for the Blind (RLSB) and the digital product design
company Ustwo jointly developed a smart mobile application named Wayfindr specially for the blind.
They have set a number of signal transponders in metro stations, which can connect with signals on
matching smart device of the visually impaired, and then remind them of corresponding interior metro
structure, barriers and staircases via bone-conduction earphones. Nevertheless, this system requires
tremendous investment in manpower and material resources to maintain its normal operation, while
the visually impaired also have to bear relevant equipment funds. The launch of this design is far less
smooth as planned, but its original design intention of “technology changes lives of the visually
impaired” in the premise of technological development is in itself a process of “converting the
invisible into the visible”, which can help the visually impaired experience the great power of
technology and design despite their inability to see the well-developed information world clearly.

4. Create More “Unseen but Known” Designs

The “known and seen” iconic culture puts forward in Gombrich’s theory of “iconography” is perfectly
in line with the theory of symbolic interaction in information interaction, which indicates that people
can transform the symbolic information they see into operation information they know for carrying out
subsequent interactive motions, but apparently, this theory cannot be applied to interaction fields of
the blind. Both the above-mentioned wavy staircase handrails and the recently developed App
Wayfindr have evaded the seen but adopted other senses well known to the blind for design and
research. Serious designers are men who never blindly follow the general trend of new technology, for
they are experts in recognizing changes. Technology art in this smart era emphasizes human’s
co-evolution with the technological ecology. Realizing the interaction accessibility is nowadays of
great urgency, so designers should create more excellent “unseen but known” designs to bring light to
the darkness sensed by the blind in this unfamiliar, smart society.

References
[1] Lei Sun 2013 Action, Ethic and Public Space: Research on Hannah Arendt’s Communicative
Political Philosophy (Bei Jing: Beijing Normal University Publishing House) p 15-18
[2] Bing Long, Mingzi Wang J 2015 Technical Routes of Urban Village Reconstruction Planning in
the Big-Data Era. Architecture and culture, (4) 3
[3] JoséSaramago 2014 Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Hai Nan:Nan Hai Publish Co.) p 2-6
[4] Correspondence to: Silvio P. Mario, World Health Organization, 20 Avenue Appia, 1211
Geneva 27, Switzerland
[5] Press Release WHO/46 6 September 1999
[6] Bowman 2011 Modernity and the Holocaust (Jiang Su:Yi Lin Press) p 1-5
[7] Catherine Grew 2005 Art involved in the space. (Guang Xi: Guangxi Normal University Press)