A study of tile design for tactile guide pathways

Tactile guide paths can assist blind people to follow a particular route by using their shed feet to detect and distinguish raised patterns. Two kinds of tile are used to form a tactile guide path, pathway tiles with raised strip patterns are used to indicate the direction of travel to be taken and dome tiles with raised dot patterns are used to indicate a potential hazard or a junction. However, the contrast between these two tiles is not very great, so the users may not detect a junction or hazard. The experiment reported here compared existing guide paths with a possible new design, in which, the stimulation from pathway tiles was altered to provide a higher contrast with dome tiles. Twenty-three blind subjects participated in this study. They negotiated an existing guide path and a new design guide path. Each path was 30.3 m long and containing 10 junctions. Performance and responses of the subjects were used to evaluate the paths. The results showed that junction discrimination accuracy and time for the new design were significantly better than for the old design. The subjects also said that that new design was better.