YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY! ARE YOU BLIND!
Image description: an angry exasperated emoji face.
There are signs posted everywhere. There are arrows on the floor plainly indicating which way you can go. Footprint stickers show where you can stand. Everyone can see that. Or can they?
No. The simple answer is that not everyone can see the” new rules” signs, lane indicators, and marks to show where you can stand.
Things have changed and things are potentially risky to your health. This ramps up the overall tension so that sometimes the most even-tempered person may respond to another person’s error with exasperation.
For those of us anywhere on the blindness spectrum the experience of going out into society can be more stressful than for that of the average-sighted person. And that was before the COVID-19 complications. Many of us have assistance to manage living with the new procedures, and many do not. If you live independently and do not have access to support, you have to go out and take care of business yourself.
With this in mind, I’d like to remind everyone, and particularly those who work with the public, that there is a spectrum of blindness and both the white cane and the wearable checkered eye symbol indicate that their user is on that spectrum.
To sum up:
- there are new rules posted
- blind people can’t see the signs
- check for the checkered eye, watch for white canes and please have some understanding.