Loading...

Access Hound — Writings From the Field

Accessible Media is Better, More-Inclusive Media

Accessibility obstacles can include unkempt vegetation

Accessibility
Jul 01, 2026
Avatar
Brett Oppegaard, Ph.D.
Executive Director

An Access Hound collaborator who is blind is stopped cold by overgrown vegetation on an entry ramp at a public place. DESCRIBING: A vertical color photograph. SYNOPSIS: A man with a white cane stands on a sunlit sidewalk, which is bordered by railings and thick vegetation that crosses over the railings, blocking the path. Long grass stems droop across the walkway at face height. The person faces downward and pauses, trying to decide how to approach the obstacle. IN-DEPTH DESCRIPTION: The photo centers on a white man with short dark hair, sunglasses, a black T-shirt, black shorts, and black sandals. He is facing the camera, in the center of a narrow and smooth concrete path that curves gently into the distance to the viewerʻs right and is lined on both sides by a waist-high metal handrail. The person holds a white cane in both hands; the cane tip points to the pavement near his right foot. Long, seed-tipped grasses arch from both sides of the path and brush the person’s head and chest, creating a face-level barrier. A midday sun casts a shadow of the person and cane onto the path in front of him.

Photo by Brett Oppegaard

One of the most challenging aspects of accessibility work is the constantly changing environment around us, including media, history, and ... vegetation. 

What I mean by that is that we are constantly getting new media created about our public places (all of which needs Audio Description, but if a place's media production workflow is broken and doesn't include AD, then it just keeps making the problems worse by adding more inaccessible media to the world in a constant flow). In addition, all of that media eventually becomes history, and history is constantly being updated and reevaluated, meaning even what we think we see with some visual cues actually could mean something else, later on, when new historical knowledge is created. All of that creates a high level of maintenance of information.

On top of it, I encountered something interesting this week during a site evaluation that I had not thought much about before: How does the ever-changing state of the natural world add to the dynamic complexities of information to make places that keep up with it, hmmm, more stable, perhaps, and places that don't, more difficult to navigate and to learn about. 

In this case, I was bringing one of my research collaborators to a public place that had two approaches to the front door. One was a set of stairs, and the other was a curving ramp, with rails, which looked pretty robust and easy to navigate. I asked my collaborator about which approach he would like to take, and he chose ramp. That was a good choice, until we rounded the curving bend of the ramp and were slapped in the face over and over again with tall grass stalks that had grown over the rails of the ramp to be right at face height for us. 

I pushed through the grass and alerted my collaborator to the situation. He is blind and was unable to bat the grass away from his face, so if I would not have been there to be a shield, he would have been like in a Three Stooges skit, getting slapped by this grass over and over again for at least 15 feet before reaching the cleared area in front of the door (by the way, the stairs approach did not have the grass growing in front of it, so it was only evident for those who took the ramp). 

Of course, the easiest thing to do here is to just cut the grass, but I can imagine in some other cases, where historic trees grow into paths at head height, or there could be other situations that exist where the changes in the natural environment stop, disrupt, or diminish the experience people are trying to have. Sometimes those could be a nuisance or even dangerous. Anyone else come across something like this?

5 min read
Share this post:
Top