On February 22 2023, in a little venue in Belgium, we played a free gig to a few people.It's a somewhat rainy evening and we're playing a set live, that has ...
Content warning: The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: Day 9 - Belgium - expand the content warning to open the window for the day.
Back in 2018 I spent a month in Brussels. It was the first time I lived in a capital city so it was quite a stressful experience: not much time, a couple of routes to learn, pretty loud and congested streets and trash bags put directly on the pavements - an easy target to hit with a white cane. I enjoyed it though and one takeaway I've got is how easy to read the tactile plans at the Brussels central station are. Normally, I have difficulties relating what I touch on a tactile plan of a building to the real world. That station made a heavily simplified version of the experience by placing a pole at each crossroad of the tactile floor marking, with a simplified tactile plan at the top telling you where each of the forks of the floorline would take you. It looked a lot like the four navigation keys and the confirmation key on a classic mobile. Each of the arrows ended with a Braille description of the destination in both French and Dutch. This was a great help. Also QDos to the sound designers who created the jingle for the Brussels public transport company. It's a pretty dancey beat of five notes played on a synthesizer which would make a nice text tone. Find it at the end of the company's promo video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmNBW0jdmso #Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Belgium #PublicTransport
