Travel Experiences in Work and Social Contexts for Adults who are Blind or Visually Impaired

Maintaining orientation while traveling is essential to enabling independent travel for adults who are blind or visually impaired. As one of the defining tasks that dictate spatial behavior, the ability to maintain orientation supports or diminishes the literal and figurative space one inhabits. Survey work with blind and visually impaired travelers has shown that they are forgoing essential trips, in part because of a perceived lack of self-efficacy in travel. This study foregrounds the lived experiences of travelers with visual impairments and blindness as they shared stories of travel in two contexts: work-related travel and travel for leisure. In exploring the phenomenon of orientation in travel, the research seeks to find what facilitators and barriers to independent travel and self-efficacy emerge from the narratives of adults as they describe their travels in two contrasting contexts. This narrative analysis study centers the experiences of five participants across two rounds of interviews and a third interaction of gathering an audio artifact. Inductive coding as well as models for narrative structural and Actantial analysis highlighted the findings: (a) survey knowledge was used to facilitate greater self-efficacy in commute travel and was actively developed by participants to support independence and confidence; (b) leisure travel was not afforded the same dedication to cultivating survey knowledge, rather it was often reliant on routine expertise to enact routes; (c) stories of routes that relied on routine expertise more often led to participant confusion and self-doubt in travel abilities. Participants shared their struggles with travel, but also shared the techniques they had learned outside formal mobility education to support their own feelings of self-efficacy in travel. This narrative analysis study elucidates the role travel context plays in how adults with visual impairments and blindness approach establishing and maintaining their orientation. Through better instruction on the nature of travel, enabled through survey knowledge and routine enaction, it might be possible to support greater feelings of self-efficacy in travelers and improve their quality of life.