| Abstract: | Because China has put more emphasis on people with disabilities, their living conditions and protection have received increasing attention. In an emergency, the visually impaired people are limited in their ability to evacuate, especially along egress paths with obstacles. This paper studied the relationship between the travel time of visually impaired people and obstacle density in their path. Eight sighted people and 32 people with visual impairments were chosen to carry out the walking experiment. The results of the experiment showed that the travel time of sighted people was shorter than that of visually impaired people under the same obstacle and non‐obstacle situations. Based on the analysis of variance of travel time, it was clear from the results that the travel time of the visually impaired people rapidly increased when there were obstacles. When the obstacle density was kept to within a certain range, there was no obvious increase in travel time. Once the density exceeded this range, there was another obvious increase. Based on this result, it can be seen that keeping the obstacle density to within a certain range could be helpful for the visually impaired people during an evacuation when the egress paths cannot be made obstacle‐free. |
