A Human Factors Approach to the Assessment of the Mobility of Blind Pedestrians

Improving the mobility of blind pedestrians will require the application of methods developed by human factors specialists. Mobility must be recognized as a complex skill, the analysis of which will provide the information that is needed for the design of mobility aids, the development of training methods, and the evaluation of both. This paper suggests some of the requirements of a method for assessing the mobility of blind pedestrians. In so far as possible, mobility should be studied in a situation that provides both experimental control and reasonable fidelity to those situations in which the mobility task is ordinarily performed. Measures should be independent of the mobility aid used by the blind pedestrian. They should be operationally defined. They should assess behaviors that lead to the realization of the terminal objective of the mobility task. Finally, measures should be included that permit valid inferences concerning the perceptual and cognitive processes upon which mobility depends, so that a more adequate theory of mobility can be developed.

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