Before Chris Downey lost his sight, he had a wind chime on his front porch. After he became blind, he realized that he could listen out for it to help him find his way home. But after a few years, his nextdoor neighbor added a wind chime to their porch. And then the neighbor on the other side, just uphill, added a chime of their own. “Three in a row!” Downey said.
He assumed at this point that his chime would no longer be able to help him locate his house. But then he noticed that the chime that the neighbor up the hill had hung was slightly higher in pitch compared to his own, and the neighbor who lived slightly downhill had hung lower, deeper chimes. “It was completely coincidental,” Downey said. “But they were perfectly sonified to match the topographic condition.”
Downey had worked as an architect for 20 years before he became blind in 2008, and this chorus of wind chimes suggested a new direction in his work: The sounds of the city weren’t just decorative, musical — they could define the physical contours of a space as dramatically as a concrete wall or an open door to the street.
Chris Downey played a significant role in the design of the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco. Credit: Engel Ching / Shutterstock
He began developing a set of design principles that understood architectural accessibility not only in terms of wheelchair ramps and braille on elevator buttons, but ones that considered the ways that sound (and other senses) shaped the experience of blind and other disabled people navigating the built environment. He became part of an evolving conversation in inclusive design that expanded the idea of access, and reconsidered the place of the disabled body in public space. A month after the brain surgery that caused him to lose his vision, he was back at work.
A few years into this new phase of his career, Downey started working with Arup, an engineering consulting firm that had developed an immersive spatial audio lab. Their work allowed Downey to create sonic architectural blueprints by simulating the sound of a space — an atrium, hallway or pavilion — before the design was constructed (after which, Downey pointed out, it would be too late to meaningfully adjust the soundscape). As part of this process, Arup recorded the sound of Downey’s cane tapping on various materials he wanted to use, and placed these recordings within the virtual designs to understand the sonic dimensions of his plans.
Today, Downey is working on a project to combine the campuses of a school for the Deaf and a school for the blind in Indiana. Working with Arup, and collaborating with a Deaf architect, he’s modeling pathways through the campus and painstakingly constructing a useful, pleasurable soundscape for the blind students. “We’re not adding sounds to it,” Downey said. “We’re letting the architectural space and material shape the sound.” As a blind student at the Indiana school makes their way from the locker area to the classrooms, in Downey’s new design, the soundscape will subtly shift from a more open, reverberant space filled with reflective surfaces, to a dampened passage, indicating the location of the classrooms.
Credit: bluestork / Shutterstock
“People say that accessibility is the foundation of the house. … It feels like we’re never getting to the part that’s above that foundation; the ceiling, the interesting parts. It’s time for us to expand what ‘access’ means.” –Paul DeFazio
Downey applies these same principles to the plans he makes for mainstream projects like museums, offices and transit centers. But making a space accessible for blind and low-vision people often also means thinking beyond sound. The majority of people with visual impairments have some form of light perception, so accessible design for the blind must (perhaps counterintuitively) pay attention to visual considerations as much as sonic and tactile ones. This is why the warning strip that runs along the edges of subway platforms must be bright yellow as well as mottled with discernible bumps.
In urban spaces, sound pollution often prevents travelers from relying on sound alone as a cue. In his design for the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco, Downey had to contend with a terminal that held dozens of buses at a time, drowning out any subtle acoustic design he might have been tempted to craft. Likewise, the pattern of bus traffic — swooping in and out of loading bays — created a sawtooth-shaped curb that made for an inefficient landmark for cane travelers. “You couldn’t follow the curb along the edge, otherwise you’ll be there all day, going in and out, in and out,” Downey said. His solution was to mark the route with a series of linear grooves and a textured pathway a cane user could find and follow. “You move from smooth, polished concrete to a rougher surface,” he said. “That’s the signal path to the exit.”
This also had the advantage of integrating blind people into the design. “The yellow, truncated-dome guiding strip, that’s the typical way of thinking,” Downey said. “Yes, it’s needed for a smooth transition from the sidewalk to the road, but putting it down the length of a sidewalk or terminal — nobody benefits except, in theory, the blind person.” Yellow warning strips are normally reserved for hazards, like a subway track, so using them for navigation sends a mixed signal. A solution like the textured concrete pathway, which adds an elegant visual accent along with a tactile guide, Downey said, is “more approachable, and less stigmatizing.”
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The notion of universal design — that design for disability leads to better design for everyone — has undeniable appeal (the curb cut, which benefits wheelchair users, but quickly became beloved by people with strollers, carts, scooters, and so on, is the canonical example). But the reality is that building access also creates conflict. Some people who use walkers or wheelchairs, including those with spinal-cord injuries, hate rumble-strips and other textured elements on the ground that blind people value as warning or wayfinding elements. For the concrete in the Salesforce Transit Center, Downey built full-size mockups in the construction yard and brought in people with a variety of mobility impairments, in addition to cane and guide-dog users, to find a texture that was at once discernible to blind people but minimized the discomfort of those who needed to roll over it.
Even within groups of blind and low-vision people, consensus on best practices can be elusive. Paul DeFazio, a blind architect, was consulting on accessible signage in a renovation of Boston’s Logan airport. “They kept making signs with a light-green background and white text,” DeFazio said. “I told them, ‘You need to make the background black. … That’s what’s best for blind people.’ Then, they brought in a group of user testers, one of whom said of the black version: ‘I can’t see that! You have to use a white background!’”
The conflict, for DeFazio, was a sign that the design process was working. “The depoliticized version feels too good,” he said, referring to a situation where, say, a blind person convinces the designers that the black background is the right choice, and everyone agrees, pats each other on the back, and goes home. “That’s consensus.” DeFazio is more interested in dissensus: “I don’t know what’s going to feel good for you,” he said, “but we can create a space and figure it out together.” In the end, DeFazio said, the group may never arrive at an agreement. “Sometimes you just have to be comfortable with the fact that we need different things.”
In her role as principal access and mobility planner at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Maddy Ruvolo deals with lots of disabled dissensus. “So much of transportation planning is about contested use of space,” she said. “And accessibility is a big piece of that.” She described a “dilemma” around parking: Disabled people are statistically more likely to be pedestrians, and use public transit, and so efforts to reduce the presence of cars (and, thus, parking spaces) increase pedestrian safety and the efficiency of public transit. But, Ruvolo said, there are also many people with disabilities who “depend on cars for mobility, and have real concerns about needing to park near their destinations.” As with DeFazio’s dilemma at Logan airport, compromise and friction is a permanent fixture of the landscape.
A ‘listening session’ in the Arup Sound Lab in Chicago for the Indiana School for the Deaf and the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Credit: Annie Hollibaugh / Ratio Design
The rise of hybrid electric vehicles in the early 2000s quieted the soundscape by reducing the number of loud combustion engines. But after a sharp rise in near-misses, injuries and, in some cases, fatalities in encounters between people (many of them blind) and these new, quieter cars, blind groups called for legislation. The Pedestrian Safety Act of 2010 finally established a requirement for all hybrid and electric vehicles to make a discernible sound under 20mph. Downey sees this as an opportunity. “We now have the ability to design an acoustic urban space with better sound,” he said. But not all EV noise is created equal. Downey had strong opinions about the variety of sounds that EVs and hybrids made. When a friend came to pick him up in an Audi e-tron, Downey thought: Now, this is what an EV should sound like. “It didn’t sound apologetic — they weren’t fulfilling a requirement,” he said. “Someone thought: What should it really sound like? It’s an authentic, impressive-sounding, fabricated automotive sound.”
The next arena after EVs is, of course, AVs — autonomous vehicles, from Google’s driverless Waymo taxis on the streets of Phoenix and L.A., to Honolulu’s autonomous metro train system. Many blind people (myself included) are thrilled at the prospect of access to a car that doesn’t rely on someone else’s schedule, sobriety or skill as a driver. But blind (and other disabled) riders sometimes rely on human interaction: Many blind people want to confirm with their driver that their destination is indeed where the map says it is once they’ve arrived. And finding an idling driverless car can be much harder than finding one with a human who might roll down their window and call out your name. After blind organizations petitioned Waymo, riders can now trigger a honk or even a short digital melody to help them find their ride in a noisy environment.
Perhaps the most profound shift in blind people’s experience of navigating urban environments is the rise of the smartphone. “When I’m riding in a car, with the windows rolled up, I’m in a cocoon,” Mike May said. He’s been developing consumer tech to help blind people with navigation for more than 30 years, most recently at the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville. “You’re 100 percent dependent on the sighted person knowing what’s out there.” But when GPS came on the scene, May saw a new way for a blind person to explore their environment. “There’s a whole world, with millions of points of interest, and I can know what they are,” he said.
The problem is that Google Maps and other mainstream products aren’t verbose enough. “Driving along, the sighted person doesn’t want to hear about everything they’re passing, because they can see it,” May said. But the blind person wants to know about the dog groomer studio tucked into the shadow of the Starbucks, or a new falafel joint in their neighborhood. “Google and Apple don’t announce that info, because sighted people don’t need it,” May said. So he created a series of technological interventions — most recently an app called Indigo — that deliver that higher level of verbosity. May’s app is one of dozens that exist to solve variations on this problem. There are apps that help with street crossings, apps that help plan routes, apps that print tactile maps and apps that aid in indoor navigation. And in the last few years, multimodal A.I. like ChatGPT and Meta’s sunglasses can use front-facing cameras to describe the environment.
Credit: Sun_Shine / Shutterstock
“Sometimes you just have to be comfortable with the fact that we need different things.” –Paul DeFazio
“We’re at a tipping point,” Stephanie Enyart, chief public policy and research officer at the American Foundation for the Blind, said. “People are developing apps like wildfire, and there’s an overstimulation effect, from a sonic perspective.” The modern blind person has to keep track of a complex inventory of digital bleeps, alerts, melodies, announcements and chimes, some of which might be trivial and some of which might be offering urgent information about their environment. As with so much A.I. discourse, there is at once tremendous excitement at the affordances it offers (the ability, for example, for a blind person to receive instant, interactive, in-depth descriptions of everything from an airline gate to a museum exhibition), but the risk of hallucination remains real, to say nothing of the serious environmental, social and labor concerns. A flub on a description of a happy-hour menu is frustrating; a mistake on a street crossing could be catastrophic. “The stakes are so high,” Enyart said.
In spite of this extensive range of cutting-edge technological and architectural interventions into the built environment, every blind person I spoke with about urban accessibility mentioned what Bryan Bashin, president of the Be My Eyes Foundation, one of the aforementioned tech solutions, called “inadvertent accessibility.” These are the thousands of small features of the environment that weren’t installed to be helpful, but rather — like the trio of ascending windchimes on Downey’s street — arise naturally, and offer at least as much delight as utility. “Have you ever heard the acoustic signature of a picket fence?” Bashin asked. “Or noticed a particular click and clack in a railroad that denotes an exact spot in a hundred-mile system?”
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DeFazio, the blind architect who consulted on the Logan Airport signage, recently explored Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex while researching a blind architectural curriculum he’s developing. “The building is like the inside of a Dr. Seuss book,” he said. “Big atriums that bounce sound in a disorienting way.” He heard someone playing a piano, but struggled to locate it in the acoustically off-kilter hall, and found the experience of wandering around intensely pleasurable, even as it was also unmistakably “weird and confusing” to navigate.
“People say that accessibility is the foundation of the house,” DeFazio said, referring to basic architectural compliance: Can every visitor enter the building, use the bathroom, and avoid grievous bodily injury along the way? But this narrow focus can be limiting. “A house with just a foundation isn’t going to be very welcoming,” he said. “It feels like we’re never getting to the part that’s above that foundation; the ceiling, the interesting parts” — the strange pleasures of an eccentric soundscape. “It’s time for us to expand what ‘access’ means.”
