PLACES: A Framework for Supporting Blind and Partially Sighted People in Outdoor Leisure Activities

Interacting with natural environments such as parks and the countryside improves health and wellbeing. These spaces allow for exercise, relaxation, socialising and exploring nature, however, they are often not used by blind and partially sighted people (BPSP). To better understand the needs of BPSP for outdoor leisure experience and barriers encountered in planning, accessing and engaging with natural environments, we conducted an exploratory qualitative online survey (22 BPSP), semi-structured interviews (20 BPSP) and a focus group (9 BPSP; 1 support worker). We also explored how current technologies support park experiences for BPSP. Our findings identify common barriers across the stages of planning (e.g. limited accessible information about parks), accessing (e.g. poor wayfinding systems), engaging with and sharing leisure experiences. Across all stages (PLan, Access, Engage, Share) we found a common theme of Contribute. BPSP wished to co-plan their trip, contribute to ways of helping others access a place, develop multisensory approaches to engaging in their surroundings and share their experiences to help others. In this paper, we present the initial work supporting the development of a framework for understanding the leisure experiences of BPSP. We explore this theme of contribution and propose a framework where this feeds into each of the stages of leisure experience, resulting in the proposed, PLACES framework (PLan, Access, Contribute, Engage, Share), which aims to provide a foundation for future research on accessibility and outdoor leisure experiences for BPSP and people with disabilities.