This Document

“If you design for the blind in mind, you get a city that is robust, accessible, well-connected...a more inclusive, more equitable city for all.”

Chris Downey

Blindness and vision loss

A person is considered legally blind if they cannot see at six metres what someone with normal vision can see at 60 metres or if their field of vision is less than 20 degrees in diameter. A person is said to have low vision when they have permanent vision loss that cannot be corrected with glasses and affects their daily functioning.(“Blindness and vision loss,” 2014).

The majority (60 percent) of blindness and low vision clients are aged 65 years or older. (Gordon Duff, August 2015) However, visual impairment can still happens to anyone. Low vision can affect people of all ages and can have an impact on many aspects of a person’s life. It may cause problems with recognising faces, reading the newspaper, dialling the telephone or seeing road signs.

Purpose

In Melbourne, most fitness centers are designed for people with normal vision while people with poor vision are underlooked and not well-involved. A report shows that the design of fitness equipment used in many gyms is a barrier to people with sight loss taking part in exercise. (RNIB, 9 February 2018) So there is a big space that can be improved and incorporated in the fitness center design. Therefore, the purpose of this strategic brief is to build up essential guidelines and values that can be incorporated into future fitness spaces for blind people or visually impaired people.

This document’s intension is refurbished project can be conceived as a pilot project that also contributes to the possibility of more fitness center transforming development in the future.