by Jeff Moyer
(Author’s note: The following document is based on a presentation I gave to airport managers and administrators to educate them about our difficulties, as visually impaired people, with independent navigation through airports. It is presented here as an accurate statement about that topic and to inform “Braille Forum” readers about a solution that works!)
Air travel is, for me, as for hundreds of thousands of others, a necessity. I travel frequently and place a high value on the freedom and removal of geographic barriers that air travel represents. Yet, in spite of my appreciation for air travel, navigating the airports which are the gateways to my geographic independence has become an increasingly difficult mobility challenge for me.
As a matter of fact, confronting my increasing difficulty with independent navigation through the various airports I routinely encounter has become my own personal barometer of progressive vision loss. When I had a fair amount of useful vision left, I could see enough to read jumbo gate signs, restroom signs at casual walking distance, and even signs designating concourses, baggage claim, and other critical locations. But as details of the visual world have fallen away, I have had to develop other strategies, not always successfully, to accomplish the routine tasks associated with airport use.
In 1975 I could still see large gate signs, but I could no longer read small restroom signs which were often placed in the middle of restroom doors. Then, in the mid-‘70s, people with low vision like me were presented a wonderful innovation in assistive optical devices, a focusable telescope which could be variably focused on targets at distances as close as 15 inches. When I acquired this highly versatile and flexible tool, I could once again read signs, regardless of the distance I was away from them. I felt empowered, delighted and home free.
I remember a situation I found myself in, shortly after I acquired my first optical telescope. I was connecting on a transcontinental trip from San Francisco to New York. We stopped in Denver or Houston or wherever and I de-planed to stretch my legs and seek some personal respite. I observed a number of people going in and out of a door which I suspected was the men’s room entrance. With confidence I pulled out my telescope (it resembled an old-fashioned pirate spyglass!) to read the sign on the door across the concourse aisle. This gadget, I remember thinking to myself, could allow me to regain an almost forgotten — and much valued — freedom, the ability to find the bathroom without assistance. Peering through my miniature telescope I trained the focal point on the center of the likely men’s room entrance and attempted to find and read the plastic strip which was the sign. Twisting the device to bring the sign into focus took a few seconds. As I finally got the optical system to focus and was slowly beginning to read the sign, the door swung open, and I was staring into the intensely contemptuous face of a very angry woman who was exiting the woman’s room door and glaring into the telescope of a person who she assumed was a pervert trying to sneak a peek into the woman’s rest room. Red-faced and stunned, I hurriedly put my telescope away, and attempted to look casual as I strode down the concourse, hoping she would not call security.
In intervening years, restroom signs have become an ever more elusive “golden fleece” of my airport travel.
Some of my most significant problems have resulted from the new ADA specifications for rest room signs. Airport administrators and decorators, it seems, can interpret the specifications in widely disparate ways.
The signs with the big, bold type are very easy to see and read if you know where to look, and if you can see well enough to read them. But, the question arises, if you don’t have much usable vision, where are they?
In one city I was visiting, the airport planner put the darned things against the far wall of the entrance to the restrooms, so that when I got right on top of the sign in order to read it, I found myself already standing in the actual restroom entrance hallway. Of course, it took two tries to find the right accessible “men’s room” sign!
In Cleveland, they decided not to bother with the tactile aspect of the specifications, and had signs produced that are almost completely flat. Belatedly recognizing that their signs were supposed to include a tactile element, they augmented their flat signs with a peel-off sort of “universal figure” and letters.
About three years ago, I was departing from Cleveland Hopkins. This was my “home” airport and one with which I was very familiar. However, recent airport renovations had re-configured the airport layout, and I was uncertain about the exact path of travel from the airline check-in concourse to the hall which led to the gate concourses and restrooms. I asked another traveler if the men’s room was down the new hallway and to the right, and he confirmed my guess. I thanked him and went on my way. I traversed the 30 yards or so of the connecting hallway turned right and approached the restroom, my first destination. Then, above the din of travelers and “Muzak” and airport announcements, I heard — along with hundreds of others — the booming voice of my new friend, “Okay, buddy, turn to the left, the toilet is right there... keep going, on the left... right there, the toilet is right there!”
My self-appointed guardian still stood where I had left him, where he could observe my every movement, from the top of a short flight of stairs, which gave him the vantage point he needed to guide me from a distance.
I quietly acknowledged his less than subtle assistance with a wave and a murmured, “Thanks, thanks a lot.”
Then there was the time in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport that I boarded the electric cart, and joined several blue-haired ladies traveling as a group. I discretely asked the driver of the cart to drop me at the restroom nearest to my gate. I actually enjoy the independence and even the challenge of finding the gate in short range, sort of the glory lap of airport travel. Passers-by are usually willing impromptu guides, and the distance from restroom to gate is never far. And so I asked my golf cart chauffeur to drop me at the entrance of the male gender room of rest.
He turned and in a loud voice rich with cowboy twang shouted to the other passengers on the cart, “You ladies don’t mind waiting for this feller while he uses the toilet, do you ladies? Y’all have plenty of time before y’all’s flight!”
Unnerved, I quietly implored him to merely drop me off, and I explained that I did not require the courtesy of a full cart wait.
“Ladies,” my persistent support person continued, “This feller doesn’t want us to wait for him while he is in the toilet! Tell him we don’t mind.”
Now more assertively, I told him sternly that I neither wanted nor needed him or the ladies to wait for me, just drop me off, PLEASE!
We drove along in silence until the driver pulled the cart over and shouted over his shoulder, “The toilet’s over there. I’ll ask this gate agent to keep an eye out for you when you come out of the toilet.”
Now quite flushed and feeling a combination of relief to be done with him and consternation at his most public pronouncements, I found the door to the empty restroom, located a stall, and settled in. My quietude was short-lived as I quickly suspected something was terribly wrong when I heard the clicking of oncoming high heels, and women’s voices in conversation. The unavoidable realization struck, I was in the right convenience, but in the wrong, wrong room. After hurriedly considering my options, I decided to wait until the crowd seemed to clear, find the exit and blend back into concourse pedestrian traffic.
Unfortunately, the gate agent and apparently everyone else waiting at the gate across from the women’s restroom had watched me go in, and indeed had kept an eye out for my return. But no salutations were forthcoming; the place was silent as a tomb.
Then, just last month, my wife and I were in St. Louis, and she directed me into the restroom opening and told me to turn right. The way was temporarily blocked with other men and their luggage, but I perceived that this was one of those restrooms that could be accessed from either end of the partition forming the entrance. I turned left, proceeded, but was abruptly turned around by a woman exiting the women’s room, which shared the opening.
I could share even more examples of this string of public embarrassments caused by navigating environments without accessible signs, but you get the picture.
Now consider the benefits of signs that talk! Talking signs broadcast spoken-voice information which is transmitted via infrared light. The transmitted sound can be heard only by travelers with receivers, who use the signs as precise beacons for sign location and information. Talking Signs are silent, invisible and unobtrusive to everyone except the people who need them. For people who cannot read the printed signs posted in the built environments where they travel, talking signs offer beacons of simple information, transforming the unfamiliar into the navigable and obvious.
When people who are visually impaired travel in settings where talking signs are part of the environment, all destinations become obvious and accurate, and the possibility of independent travel opens like a magic door. I know that it won't be long before all major airports are signed for everyone.
Today, we consider it right and normal for people who get around in wheelchairs to have access to public buildings via ramps, automatic doors, accessible phones and restrooms and other amenities. Why not provide real access for travelers who can’t read print signs as well? A city could provide no more universally accessible welcome mat than to make airports truly accessible to all. So, come on airport designers, and managers, join your colleagues at airports like Reagan National in Washington, D.C., where the plans for renovating the old terminal include installation of talking signs. Give us a sign, an accessible and useful talking sign!
(For more information on the signs manufactured and marketed by Talking Signs, Inc., visit their web site at http://www.talkingsigns.com.)