By Stephen Burton | Featuring Dave Dean
When we design a street, we usually design it for the eye. We think about sightlines, vistas and signage. But for the 575,000 Australians with vision impairment, the city is not a visual landscape. It is a tactile and auditory puzzle.
In this episode of The Placemakers, I spoke with Dave Dean, a music promoter and Sunshine Coast local who has lived with progressive vision loss due to Bardet-Biedl syndrome.
Dave walks us through the reality of navigating a public precinct without sight. He explains why “aesthetic” decisions—like angled crossings or cluttered footpaths—can be physically dangerous, and introduces us to the critical concept of “shorelining.”
🎧 Listen to the Episode
We discuss the hidden hazards of the streetscape and how to design for the ear and the cane.
📄 Accessibility & Reference
Prefer to read? Download the full word-for-word transcript of this interview.
For a sighted person, walking in a straight line is easy. For Dave, it requires a continuous tactile reference point.
“Shorelining is where you use your cane against a gutter, a footpath edge, or the side of a shop so you know where you are and walk straight,” Dave explains.
This is why street clutter is more than just an annoyance; it is a navigational breaker. When councils or shop owners place A-frame signs, planter boxes, or bins against the building line, they sever the “shoreline.”
“That gives me the sh*&s more than anything,” Dave says. “You can’t find the shoreline because you’re trying to find the building, and you knock over a sign… You don’t think about them until you trip over them.”
Design tip: Keep the building edge clear. Place street furniture in a predictable “furnishing zone” away from the path of travel.
Tactile Ground Surface Indicators (TGSIs) are the raised bumps you see at crossings and stairs. To the general public, they are just textured pavers. To Dave, they are critical warning signals.
“I call them ‘I’m about to get f*cked up dots’ because I’m either going to fall down some stairs, get run over by a car, or fall down escalators,” Dave jokes.
While useful, their application is often inconsistent. Dave notes that some roads have them on one side but not the other, leaving the user guessing. Consistency is key. A landmark can be something as simple as a change in ground texture, which allows a cane user to build a “mental map” of the precinct.
One of the most profound insights from this interview is the danger of non-standard geometry.
When a pedestrian crossing is angled or located at the top of a hill, maintaining a straight trajectory is incredibly difficult without sight.
“You have to be really careful that you aren’t listening to the wrong one and walking out into traffic,” Dave warns regarding audio signals at complex intersections. “Some roads aren’t straight across… you have to find a crack in the concrete or bitumen to guide you.”
This highlights the need for directional tactile pavers at crossings, not just warning dots, to guide the user across the void of the road.
How do we fix this? Dave suggests a simple, low-cost method for any design team: the blindfold test.
“A good thing would be to actually blindfold yourself and walk through the space to see how hard it is to navigate,” he says.
Until you have tried to find a shop entrance using only a cane, or tried to cross a busy road using only your hearing, you cannot truly understand the friction of the built environment.
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