A screenshot of a map roughly showing our route from Stadium-Chinatown station to Pacific Central in downtown Vancouver, BC. There was probably a better way to walk, but this was the one we came up with on the fly.

Bang!

Nik’s cane crashes into an unexpected obstacle as my guide dog stops unexpectedly. Confused, we reach out to inspect the problem and find a solid wall of metal gate barrier blocking our path. We were expecting to descend the stairs to the Vancouver, British Columbia Skytrain that was to take us to our departing Amtrak train back to the United States. Its 5:00 am and we have a problem.

Despite checking the night before, our carefully laid out plans to get to the Pacific Central rail station for a very early morning train are in peril. We don’t have cellular service in Canada. We could walk back to our hotel and ask them to call us a cab, but it has night security locks and we already turned in our keys. The night hotel person was only roused by the ringing of the desk bell anyway. We could try to find another open business to call from, but time is ticking. We need a plan, like, NOW.

The train station is less than a mile away. We have heavy backpacks, but we could walk. The problem is, we have no tech and we can’t even check a map or blind square. What I do know is that between our hotel and the train station is an M.C. Eisher-esque labyrinth of street viaducts and a multi level landscape encircling a body of water, False Creek. We need to avoid that, because neither of us have any clue as to how to navigate through it.

What we do have is our basic skills to rely on. We pool our knowledge. I always know which cardinal direction I’m going, and Nik remembers street names and interprets the layout of cities with accuracy. We both had been getting around downtown Vancouver without the help of technology for a week. We are at Stadium Chinatown Station. Pacific Central Station is to our southeast. To avoid the viaduct mess, we need to go north, then east, then south. We remembered that we took a bus on Pender Street, that runs roughly east/west and is not too far north of us. We remembered that our first day in Vancouver, we stopped at a McDonalds that was on Main Street, running north/south very near the train station. We figure Pender and Main Streets are, in fact, main streets and are likely to go under the viaducts and be good streets to walk on. A plan is set, we go up Beatty to Pender and guesstimate Main (we estimate its about 4-6 street crossings away) and go south down Main till we find the sky train station we would have got off on, (close to the McDonalds) then we can reverse our previous path to the train station.

It took about 20 minutes and we made our train with a few minutes to spare. Whew!

Nik and I are in the adaptive tech business, and so, of course, we love adaptive tech. What technology can do to increase the independence and access of people with disabilities is nothing short of revolutionary. Turn-by-turn walking directions, access to ride share, real-time transit information, braille displays that give access to print information, AI visual information readers, and tech services like Aira are changing what it means to be blind. However, we find time and time again that people are often not able to take advantage of this technology to its full potential without having  decent grasp of no tech or low tech basic skills.

A good example of this is using guide dogs. Guide Dogs are, in essence, a type of adaptive tech, although we usually don’t think of them that way because they are living, breathing beings that we form relationships with. But strictly looking at their use as adaptive travel enhancing tools, they can be best utilized by blind people who already have good white cane based travel skills. Guide dog schools usually require at least a minimum level of orientation and mobility training to be accepted into a guide dog program. However, in each class I’ve attended (3 now) there are always one or two students that make you wonder how they are actually even going to use the dog because their skills are so minimal. Without knowledge and skills to get around, a dog is not going to help you a great deal. If you only go from your house to door-to-door paratransit and from paratransit to your job and back, the dog’s only job will be to perhaps walk you to the bathroom down the hall. Guide dogs are best when outside, traveling city blocks and maneuvering around street furniture. They are great to get you around the micro travel obstacles, not the macro decisions about deciding where to go. My guide dog helped me walk faster to get to the train station in Vancouver, but she was no help in figuring out how to walk there. She did an amazing job getting me through a hedge maze when we visited a botanical garden the day before, but she could not have gotten us to the gardens itself without my skills in navigating there.

Guide dogs and a great GPS app like Blindsquare or a service like Aira, along with basic navigational skills can all but eliminate the challenges of traveling while blind. But good tech only enhances basic skills, it does not replace them. Nothing replaces the good, old fashioned skill of knowing where you are in space and knowing how to utilize the clues around you to navigate. And nothing can replace the confidence of knowing that tech or no tech, you can handle yourself in a multitude of situations and take charge of problem-solving your way out of them.

Sometimes extenuating circumstances, like additional disabilities impact how you can utilize high-tech or low-tech solutions to access barrier issues. But to the extent that a person is physically able, being as multimodal as possible will allow for as much freedom and independence as possible. Basic skills will allow a blind person to more easily travel the world when cellular or wifi data is unavailable, or when countries have such strong animal quarantine rules that it is best not to take a guide dog. Basic skills also allows for times when batteries die, services are malfunctioning, or the SkyTrain station doesn’t open until after you need to be at your destination.

As adaptive tech promoters and trainers, we have to be careful not to lead people to a dependence on tech if we can help it. Many times, we spend a lot of time teaching the underlying basic concepts that allow the user to get the most out of tech, rather than just jumping in to tech training itself. Technology works best when it enhances what you already can do. It’s the same for people without disabilities as well. Word processing makes the writing process quicker and easier, but it can’t replace the basic skills of composing a good thesis, organizing a compelling essay, and researching a topic. Spreadsheets make managing numbers and data much easier, but one still must have the basic skills of understanding what a profit and loss report contains, and what those numbers mean. In travel, adaptive tech can allow you to move more smoothly and efficiently, like in the case of guide dogs. Or give you additional pieces of information as in the case of GPS apps or Aira. But they cannot take total control over where you are in space and where you want to go or how you will get there. They should not replace basic competency in good blindness skills.

This is true in other areas as well. For a time, many teachers of the blind felt that teaching braille was unnecessary because speech reading computers were becoming the norm. But they soon discovered that blind students were not learning spelling and writing skills adequately and that people who did not know braille were much more likely to remain unemployed throughout life. Slate and Stylus skills (where you have to emboss dot by dot in reverse by hand)  is not used a lot anymore with the availability of refreshable braille devices increasing, but a slate and stylus can always work when the battery power dies or when the braille display is malfunctioning. Basic low tech skills can keep one employed and functioning in life by closing the gaps on unexpected circumstances, by allowing tasks to be done in multiple ways.

Although we did have wifi at our hotel and thus were able to do a lot of travel preplanning while in Vancouver, it was kind of fun to test ourselves in a different city without the use of mobile technology to help us out. Nik also went without the use of his guide dog, who is now retired so stayed home with a friend. Because we are of a certain age where we remember a time before guide dogs and ubiquitous mobile devices and blind-friendly apps,  we often comment to each other “remember when we did this without all this tech?” And it was nice to know that we still could do it. We hope the next generation will hone their own low and no tech skills as well, because it can only expand the possibilities in their world. It was not so fun to have to do an emergency unfamiliar walk at 5:00am with our luggage to try and catch a train. But, because we could do it, it turned our problem into a 20 minute inconvenience when it could have been something that took hours or even days to straighten out and costed a lot of money to fix.  Having an entire tool belt of skill sets can only lead to greater choices, freedom, access and joyful experiences.