As a totally blind person, Dawn Christensen has spent a lifetime navigating spaces that aren’t easily accessible for the visually impaired.
For example, a nearby community college once invited her to survey their new braille signage shortly after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law.
“So I go in with my driver and I'm like, ‘Okay, just let me loose,’” she remembered. “I start feeling the walls and I'm not finding any braille signage. And [my driver] says, ‘Dawn, they have all the braille signage above the doors.’”
Naturally, she couldn’t reach – and therefore read – any of it.
So when Christensen’s former employer, the Sight Center of Northwest Ohio, decided to install a historical marker in honor of its century of service, they knew it needed to be more than the traditional paragraph of text.
“What's different about our historical marker is that it has both braille and audio options,” said Tim Tegge, the Sight Center’s executive director. “As far as we know, it's the only one in the state that has that level of accessibility.”
Making history more accessible
The Sight Center of Northwest Ohio exists to help people with vision loss live independently.
Its new historical marker greets visitors with a motion-sensored announcement: “For an accessible experience, press here to listen to a detailed audio description.”
That announcement is short, but critical, Christensen said, “because otherwise a blind person isn't even going to know it's there.”
But the audio is important for another reason, too: Only about 10% of people who are blind can read braille.
“A vast majority of people lose their vision later in life, and so taking on the task of learning braille is a challenge,” Christensen said.
Not everyone who visits the Sight Center will use the historical marker’s accessible functions.
Like Christensen, Betty Kasubski is totally blind. But when she’s visiting a historical place, she says she’s normally with someone else.
“Sometimes I know they're reading it, so they might as well read it to me,” she said.
Still, Christensen says it’s nice to have the option to learn about history on her own terms.
“In my travels, there are all kinds of historical markers around this country and it's nice to know what they say,” she said.
Harnessing new technology
Accessing historical information is getting easier and easier with new technology.
Tegge, who’s legally blind, says he recently visited a WWII museum and used an app to convert text to speech.
“It was the first time where I got to wander the museum myself and listen to the description of this battle or that general at my pace,” he said. “And if I got bored in the middle of it, I could walk away. It was really a neat experience for me to have that kind of independence.”
He’s hoping that’s how visitors to the Sight Center feel when they can choose to read, touch or listen to the new historical marker.
“Then every future marker maybe will consider an audio and a braille version,” Tegge said.
Someday, he hopes, this historical marker won’t be an outlier, but the norm.
