Recalling the sonic perception of visually impaired people of Surabaya’s urban parks

Abstract

Urban parks in a developing country hardly accommodatepeople with disability. The objective of this study is to investigate thepossibility of improving urban parks using the perception of visuallyimpaired people of urban parks’ sonic environment. This study wasconducted off-site the urban park using a questionnaire survey with twogroups of participants: sighted people (35 participants) and visuallyimpaired people (35 participants). The analysis was conducted usingsemantic analysis of the word used for explaining the sonic environment. This study shows that the visually impaired participants explained thesonic environment with more terminologies (56 terminologies for visuallyimpaired participants and 32 terminologies for sighted participants). Itindicates the engagement with the sonic environment is higher for thevisually impaired participants compared to the sighted participants. Ingeneral, the visually impaired participant perception of urban parksrepresents a similar terminology, but with more perception compared to thesighted participants, i.e., safety, directivity, and space. The later stage is touse the on-site method to validate and enrich this finding to arrive at thedesign proposition for the improvement of urban parks.

Keywords

• soundscape
• visually impaired people
• urban park