A study on the visibility of the light emitting braille block

Abstract

About 60% of the visually impaired people are low-vision. Light-emitting textured paving block by using LED is developed to support the mobility of such visually impaired because such block is considered to be effective for notifying specific places such as the entrance, the exit, and so on to the weak eyesight people in the night. This block uses the innovative lighting mechanism by which extremely long-life light emission by using the battery is enabled. So far, there is no report on the visibility of the LED by using this mechanism. Therefore, in this paper, we report the result of the preliminary experiment for evaluating the visibility, and discuss on the trade-off between the visibility and the electric consumption. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.