This year’s HS TrIBES trip was really a precise experience that challenged me as well as promoted me. Each activity offered something interesting and meaningful for me. On the first day, we wore blindfolds and experienced what it might be like to live without vision. On the second day, we guided visually impaired people in the park and spent time interviewing and communicating with them. on the third day, we created a tactile museum for them to touch and feel the shape and structure of something. On the fourth day, We made a podcast together and shared all of our work to the visually impaired people. These activities made deep connection with visually impaired people and also helped them with their boring lives.
By the physical dimension, we have done something that as simple as just walking blindfolded became a real challenge. Although we always have partner beside us to guide the way, we always don’t trust them completely and fell for many times. Switch to the perspectives of visually impaired people, their life would always be build on trust between each other. That actually shocked me a lot. And also guiding visually impaired people in the park also required care to ensure safety. It’s really heavy to carry a person behind me. The level of disability makes me even more responsible. Community engagement was also helpful. When we worked together to create the tactile museum and record the podcast, collaboration was not always easy. At the very begining we’ve got tons of different opinions on how to design the large artwork. But we finally decided to draw a huge flower park with sky on it.
We don’t have a lot of Cultural enrichment but we have actually done a lot of services to others.
Guiding, listening to their stories, interviewing, and sharing our projects were a pretty innovated way to get into each other. Although we do not engage in traditional donation based activities, we provide psychological and emotional support to visually impaired people through artistic works through smell, touch, and sound. Their daily lives may otherwise be monotonous, but we make their experiences more engaging.
Through these activities, I believe we not only provided companionship but also gave them a sense of wonder. The lives of visually impaired people would often be lonely. In our conversations with them, we learned their circumstances are far more challenging than we had imagined that I was unaware of before participating in this event and interacting with them. In reality, many accessibility facilities are far not adequate. For instance, the Braille on elevators is practically useless to the them. Without voice announcements, they have almost no way of knowing which floor the elevator has stopped at. Once indoors, they struggle to find their way because navigation systems rarely cover indoor routes. Consequently, visually impaired people remain highly dependent on others for assistance. On my first day, I heard from one visually impaired person that China mainland has only a few hundred guide dogs, while the entire China population includes over 170k visually impaired individuals. Thus, owning a guide dog is extremely rare. For many, obtaining a guide dog is simply impossible due to the lengthy waiting lists. Interestingly, using smartphones also raise significant challenges. They must interact with devices using functions such as swiping up, down, left, right, tapping and rely entirely on voice narration. To increase the efficiency, they often set speech speeds extremely fast (I cannot catch the words at all), making it difficult to comprehend content clearly. Fortunately, advancements in AI have granted them the ability to use photo recognition. Consequently, their lives are significantly better than before. Even so, visually impaired people still face numerous obstacles. I believe this activity has taught me another crucial lesson that it has enhanced my understanding of the details of their daily lives. It has built a higher level of respect within them. Moving forward, I will offer more care and support whenever I meet visually impaired people.