Evaluation of the Visually Impaired Experience of the Sound Environment in Urban Spaces

Sen Zhang,Meng Zhang,Ke Zhang,Xiaoyang Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.731693

Abstract

Visually impaired people have unique perceptions of and usage requirements for various urban spaces. Therefore, understanding these perceptions can help create reasonable layouts and construct urban infrastructure. This study recruited 26 visually impaired volunteers to evaluate 24 sound environments regarding clarity, comfort, safety, vitality, and depression. This data was collected in seven different types of urban spaces. An independent sample non-parametric test was used to determine the significance of the differences between environmental evaluation results for each evaluation dimension and to summarize the compositions of sound and space elements in the positive and negative influence spaces. The results suggested that visually impaired people (1) feel comfort, safety, and clarity in parks, residential communities, and shopping streets; (2) have negative perceptions of vegetable markets, bus stops, hospitals, and urban departments; (3) feel anxious when traffic sounds, horn sounds, manhole cover sounds, and construction sounds occur; and (4) prefer spaces away from traffic, with fewer and slower vehicles, with a suitable space scale, and moderate crowd density. These results provide a reference for the future design of activity venues (i.e., residential communities, vegetable markets, bus stops, parks, shopping streets, hospitals, and urban functional departments) and the planning of accessibility systems for visually impaired urban residents.

Highlights

According to several surveys, including the second sampling survey of Chinese people with disabilities, there were approximately 85 million disabled people in China in 2018, with the total number predicted to be nearly 100 million by the end of 2021 (Kang et al, 2019)
The results suggested that visually impaired people (1) feel comfort, safety, and clarity in parks, residential communities, and shopping streets; (2) have negative perceptions of vegetable markets, bus stops, hospitals, and urban departments; (3) feel anxious when traffic sounds, horn sounds, manhole cover sounds, and construction sounds occur; and (4) prefer spaces away from traffic, with fewer and slower vehicles, with a suitable space scale, and moderate crowd density
The traffic sound was the sound of tires rubbing against the ground, the horn sound of motor vehicles and non-motorized vehicles sounding their horns, the manhole cover sound of car tires hitting the top of the manhole cover, the chat sound of conversations between passers-by within the scene, the walking sound of passers-by walking, and the hawker sound of a building or individual advertising their goods, such as a shop or supermarket

Summary

Introduction

According to several surveys, including the second sampling survey of Chinese people with disabilities, there were approximately 85 million disabled people in China in 2018, with the total number predicted to be nearly 100 million by the end of 2021 (Kang et al, 2019). The World Health Organization survey report indicated that, among people with disabilities in China, approximately 17 million are visually impaired, accounting for 20% of the global total and making China home to the largest number of visually impaired people in the world, most of whom live in its cities (Jianghua and Juhui, 2012). Impaired people suffer from varying degrees of visual impairments To illustrate, they cannot obtain information about the external environment through vision and their ability to interact with space is extremely limited. Information acquired through vision accounts for 83% of the total information

Results

Discussion

Conclusion