Tsutomu WADA, Manager, Ph.D., Japan Braille Library

By enforcement of "Barrier Free Act", various tools designed for disabled and/or elderly people have been widely implemented in public facilities such as railroad stations, city halls, parks, etc. in Japan.  Tactile Guide Maps are one of those tools for guiding blind and visually impaired persons.  Although the trend itself is desirable for the handicapped persons, some problems still remain to be solved for Tactile Guide Maps. Those problems are as follows: wrong braille letters, too big or too small map size, too high or too low setting position for reading, complex and/or useless information for blind users.  They are occurred by lack of design principles based on human cutaneous sensations.

For improvement of these problems, the standardization of design principles for Tactile Guide Maps are most effective.  Based on the discussion about the appropriate setting position, proper size of map board, useful and well-chosen information for orientation and mobility and other requirements, the JIS(Japanese Industrial Standard) for Tactile Guide Maps was published in 2016. We made some surveys to determine useful evidence for this standard, mainly on tactile markings.  In this presentation we explain some of our surveys, 1) the discriminability of one and another raised stripe patterns which are different distance of line, 2) perception of texture with dot pattern and striped pattern on Human Forefinger and 3) standard tactile mark selection survey. These results will be useful in creating more effective tactile patterns and marks for use in Tactile Guide Maps.

Authors:

Tsutomu WADA,Manager, Ph.D., Japan Braille Library, Kouki DOI,Chief Researcher, Ph.D., National Institute of Special Needs Education, Takahiro NISHIMURA, Researcher, Ph.D., National Institute of Special Needs Education, Harumi MATSUMORI^*4, Mayu KATAGIRI^, Manager, Ph.D., Japan Braille Library and Hiroshi FUJIMOTOProfessor, Ph.D., Waseda University