Since I’ve lost my usable vision, I’ve been fortunate to get a guide dog and have mobility instructors to work with. I realize that no one can give me all the info that the visual world has to offer, but sometimes I wonder how I can get all the useful information I need from mobility instructors to help me from going astray later when I try my walking routes alone with my dog.
For example, an instructor helped me work out a route through a park. The path goes up-a slight hill, then turns left and joins a sidewalk along a road. What no one told me is that there is a fork in the path, and another parallel path running next to the one I need. This parallel path spills out seamlessly into the street.
I did the route with my dog several times with no trouble, but one day, he decided to veer off ever so slightly at the fork in the paths that I didn’t know existed. Unbeknownst to me, we were then on the parallel path and we ended up in the street and got honked at by a car, which totally freaked me out. I had to retrace everything with my cane later to find out what had happened.
I just wish my instructors were more aware of how the dog can possibly go wrong and warn me about potential hazards and decoy landmarks or decoy paths. If I’d known to ask about a fork in the path, I would have. Now, I’m being more careful to ask people what some potential problems the dog might have in the area. For some reason though, people aren’t that good at noticing things that the dog could mess up on.
This next example was less risky, but still annoying. Where I live, we have controlled crossings in some places with those chirping buttons that help you know when to cross. Unfortunately, they are set up haphazardly with some of them pointing parallel to the intended direction of travel, and some perpendicular and some diagonal. You cannot trust the orientation of the buttons on the poles to show you which way you are crossing. You have to be familiar with the area.
I was trying to cross an intersection that had a crossing button at the bike lane on the left and one for the pedestrian lane on the right.
My dog took me to a crossing button, but it didn’t seem like we were on the pedestrian lane based on how the ramp felt under my feet. Usually , that would mean that I was in the bike lane, and we needed to take two steps right to get out of the bike lane and over to the pedestrian lane.
A woman came up and asked if I needed help. I asked if I was in the bike lane. She said, “yes.” So I tried to take a couple steps to my right, and she says, “No, you have to go left.”
I was so confused, and long story short, I figured out that I was wrong. There weren’t just two crossing poles with buttons. There were actually three. The leftmost one was the bike lane heading in my direction of travel, the middle one was the pedestrian lane heading in my direction of travel, and the rightmost one, which I had no idea existed, was a bike lane button heading perpendicular to my direction of travel.
It’s not that big of a deal, but when I was learning the route with my dog, it would have been helpful to know that there were 3 poles with buttons that he might potentially target so I would have understood his mistake.
I’ve had similar issues when, say, I am targeting something like a particular wall in a train station, and the dog finds a wall that seems like the correct target, but it’s actually a huge standalone billboard near the wall. The instructor is like, “Oh, he got it wrong. He found the billboard.” And I’m like “the billboard”? I didn’t even know there was one.
I know it’s tricky for instructors since if they give us too much info on the first walk, we can get overwhelmed or simply forget, but sometimes, I think it would be more helpful if they could give me just a bit more relevant info. On the other hand, I know that part of learning is just getting out there and making mistakes.
I’ve been wondering, though, can anyone else relate to this? Have you found a way to elicit information that you need?
Sometimes I annoy my family by asking things to frequently that are irrelevant, but I just donn’t know what to ask.