A Study on Risk Notion and Hazard Factors of Visually-Impaired People

Abstract

In this paper, we sort out the concept of risk regarding to visually-impaired people and investigate it by focusing on hazards which cause risk. Then, we propose a model represented by a matrix form which is useful to understand what sort of improvement contributes to reduce risk. There are several categories of visually-impaired people, such as partially sighted, low vision, legally blind and totally blind. They are able to reduce risk to some extent by utilizing auxiliary instruments such as guide dogs and white sticks. In addition to these established ways to eliminate risk, we have clarified, unfortunately, that there are still many hazards linking with risk without any effective improvement methods. There are only few hazards that visually-impaired people can improve on their own. This indicates they need substantial help and offers by community/society to eliminate most of the hazards. From this study, essential hazards concerning to possible risk is categorized by the proposed matrix-model which guides us to effective improvement countermeasures in terms of “who should make an effort mainly to solve them, the visually impaired or others”.