Design of a Map and Bus Guide to Teach Transferable Public Transit Skills

Abstract

In the field of orientation and mobility (O&M), we are presented with the task of teaching transferable skills. This task can be daunting at a state school for students who are blind, where the students are often far from home and unable to easily apply learned skills to their home areas. I work at the California School for the Blind (CSB) in Fremont, California. Having taught travel on public transit to students during my 32 years in the field, this year I decided to create a set of flexible lesson plans to teach bus travel with the hope that I would be able to use the lesson plans with a variety of students. I also hoped that I could offer students information and experiences that would better enable them to apply O&M skills they learned at home. I selected two students for this project, both of whom had some usable vision. One was an 11 year old from a rural part of the state. He had the underlying skills to be an independent bus user, and his family recognized that he might spend time in areas that are more urban than his hometown during different times of his life. The other student was in the mainstream high school program of CSB. He and the 11-year-old student both had the potential, with instruction, to plan and execute bus trips and to solve problems, although perhaps at different levels, given the differences in their ages. GETTING STARTED I began by making a tactile-visual map of the central part of the city. I used 11 x 17-inch pieces of capsule heat-sensitive paper for the Pictures in a Flash machine (PIAF, a tactile graphics image enhancer) backed by cardboard. Two and a half sheets were cut and fit together to indicate main streets in the city, including one highway and a railroad track near the school. Six primary locations were tactilely indicated on the map, including CSB, the nearby rapid-transit station, and the local community college. Street names were indicated by small pieces of Braillable Labels from American Printing House for the Blind. The map measured about 21 inches square. Because of its size, it was therefore meant to be used for travel planning in the classroom, rather than while traveling in the community. The map is pictured in Figure 1. It should be noted that the carbon from the high-carbon pencil used on the capsule paper tends to leave a residue on other parts of the map and on one's fingers. If a different type of map is made (such as out of cardboard, cork, or foam pieces), it would likely be more labor intensive but would not have this effect. Or one could try using a marker instead of a high-carbon pencil on the capsule paper and experiment with results using a PIAF tactile image maker. BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND TASKS FOR THE STUDENT The map I created was accompanied by two spiral-bound notebooks created using the Tiger Software Suite and embosser by View-Plus (technology that allows a user to emboss images as presented on the computer screen, including braille and interlined print or graphics when using a print-capable embosser). One notebook contained basic information about how city bus systems work in a general sense. The information is as follows: * City buses have numbers, such as Number 217. They often also have names referring to the direction they are traveling in or where they will end. * City buses run on A route is a specific fixed course along streets and includes specific places to turn. * City buses make stops at bus stops. Bus stops are identified by poles with signs, bus shelters or benches, painted curbs, or a combination of these items. * Bus stops can be placed before an intersection, after an intersection, or mid-block. * A bus route may cross one or more other bus routes. The bus stop closest to where two bus routes cross is an easy place to transfer from one bus to another. * You may need to walk one or more blocks to transfer from one bus to another if the two routes do not actually cross or meet. …