Every transit hub I have ever entered has tried to kill me with kindness. Soft gradients on the walls. Typefaces chosen for warmth. Color palettes that whisper instead of speaking. I stand in these spaces and I cannot find the exit, because the exit looks exactly like the wall beside it. The information is there. It is just dressed in someone else’s language.
I want to talk about getting to places. Not the poetry of arrival. The architecture of approach.
In November 2022, I sat on a panel in Sheffield about wayfinding and public transit. The moderator asked what “inclusive design” meant to each of us. A transport planner said it meant “removing barriers.” An architect said it meant “universal legibility.” I said it meant acknowledging that legibility is not universal — that it is a specific perceptual commitment, and every commitment excludes someone. The room got quiet. Not the productive quiet. The polite kind.
Here is what I mean. I am Deaf. I navigate by visual hierarchy. Contrast, scale, spatial rhythm, typography — these are not aesthetic preferences. They are my orientation system. When I walk into a train station, I am not looking for signs the way a hearing person looks for signs. A hearing person has redundancy. Announcements overhead. Someone at an information desk they can ask. The low murmur of a crowd shifting toward a platform, which tells them something has changed even before they read the board. I have the board. I have the signs. I have what is printed, posted, illuminated, and architecturally implied. If those fail, I have nothing.
You might say: but don’t phones fix this? Apps, live captioning, real-time transit updates? They help. They also assume battery life, data signal, and literacy in the app’s language. I watched a Deaf elder in the Bronx in March 2023 stand in front of a subway kiosk for eleven minutes trying to find the accessibility menu. The kiosk had been redesigned six months earlier. The new interface buried the visual route map behind two taps and a dropdown labeled “More Options.” The old one had the map on the home screen. Progress.
I think about Tangled Art + Disability’s [Getting Here](https://tangledarts.org/getting-here-walking) project a lot. It documents the specific, grinding, physical reality of how disabled people get to cultural events. Not what happens inside the gallery. What happens between your front door and the venue’s front door. The curb cuts that end in a lip. The ramp that deposits you at a locked entrance. The wayfinding that assumes you already know where you’re going.
What nobody mentions is that “getting here” is itself a design artifact. It is produced. The difficulty is not natural. Someone chose the signage hierarchy. Someone chose the font size. Someone decided which entrance would be primary and which would be “accessible” — a word that, in architectural practice, almost always means “secondary.”
Two buildings. Hold them side by side.
The Barbican Centre in London, opened in 1982. Brutalist. Infamous for its wayfinding. Yellow lines painted on the floor to guide visitors through the labyrinth. The lines were added after the building opened because people kept getting lost. The floor plan is a masterclass in spatial disorientation — level changes concealed inside ramps that curve away from sightlines, entrances nested inside other entrances. I visited in September 2019. I loved the concrete. I could not find the cinema. The yellow lines had faded in places and been painted over in others. I followed one into a dead end near a service corridor. A maintenance worker — I never got her name — pointed me toward a fire door and mimed “through there, left, left.” She had improvised a route that the building’s own signage could not provide.
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, reopened after renovation in 2012. Clean sightlines. High-contrast typography by Mevis & Van Deursen. Room numbers large enough to read from the entrance of each gallery. Floor plan available in a single visual scan from the main lobby. I visited in June 2018 and I cried. Not because of the art. Because I knew where I was. Every second. Without asking. Without my phone. Without translating someone else’s spatial logic into mine.
Same function. Same cultural category. One built environment that treats orientation as the visitor’s problem. One that treats it as the building’s job.
The Stedelijk didn’t do this for me specifically. It did it because Dutch design has a particular obsession with visual clarity that dates back to the 1920s — the same tradition that gave us Neurath’s Isotype pictograms and the social housing projects of J.J.P. Oud, where apartment layouts were designed so that a resident could see the front door from the kitchen. The principle was not accessibility. It was democracy. The idea that spatial information should not require expertise to decode. That if you have to be trained to read your own environment, the environment has failed.
This principle is wildly unfashionable.
Zen Circuit wrote recently about open offices — “The Open Office Was Designed to Break My Brain” — and the piece is sharp and true. Zen argues for environments rich in pattern, where detail rewards sustained attention, where surfaces carry information that unfolds over time. I understand this. For Zen, a minimalist space is an impoverished one. Stripped of the texture that an autistic perceptual system needs to feel oriented and engaged.
Here is where we diverge. The patterned wall that gives Zen a foothold destroys my sightlines. When every surface carries dense visual information, I lose the hierarchy. I cannot distinguish the emergency exit sign from the decorative tile from the directional arrow. It all becomes signal. Which means it all becomes noise. Zen calls my clean sightlines “impoverished.” I call their patterned walls illegible. We are both right. The same surface. Different perceptual economies.
This is the thing that accessibility checklists cannot touch. The WCAG 2.1 guidelines will tell you about contrast ratios and text alternatives and focus indicators. They will not tell you that two disabled people can need opposite things from the same wall. That my legibility is Zen’s deprivation. That their richness is my confusion. The checklist assumes a single axis of access. The reality is a grid.
Disability justice — Sins Invalid, Mia Mingus, the whole lineage — names this as interdependence. Not “we all need the same thing” but “we need each other because we need different things.” Mia Mingus said at a 2014 Allied Media Conference session in Detroit that access is not a checklist but a practice of showing up for each other’s needs even when they conflict with your own. Especially then. That is not a design problem you solve once. It is a relationship you maintain.
But here’s the tension I carry. Some part of me — the part that labels things on Tuesday mornings because the font was wrong — believes that visual clarity is not just my need. It is a public good. That the Stedelijk is better than the Barbican not just for me but for everyone. That legible environments reduce cognitive load across the board. I believe this. And I know it is a form of imperialism. My perceptual system dressed up as universal principle.
I hold that contradiction. I don’t resolve it.
What I can say is this: the problem is not that buildings are hard to navigate. The problem is that navigation difficulty is distributed along the same lines as every other form of power. If you are hearing, white, sighted, ambulatory, and literate in the dominant language, the building speaks to you. It was designed to. Everyone else is translating. And translation is labor. Unpaid, unacknowledged, constant.
Kevin Lynch wrote The Image of the City in 1960. The same year William Stokoe published his proof that ASL is a complete language. Two texts about legibility — one about urban space, one about human communication — published in the same year, and they never touched. Lynch’s five elements of urban legibility — paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks — describe exactly how I navigate. Visually. Spatially. By contrast and hierarchy. But Lynch assumed a viewer who could also hear the city. The honking that tells you the intersection is close. The change in ambient sound when you enter a tunnel. His legibility had a soundtrack. Mine doesn’t.
What I want — what Getting Here makes visible — is for the approach to be designed as carefully as the interior. For the journey to the building to be understood as part of the building. For the sign at the bus stop to use the same typographic system as the sign in the lobby. For the curb cut to aim at the entrance, not at the parking lot. For the fire alarm to strobe.
I am not asking for beauty. I am asking for the information to be where I can see it.
In fourth grade, the fire alarm went off and I learned what I was worth to the room by watching every chair empty around me while I sat still, not because I was calm but because no one had put the information where my body could receive it. The system worked. It saved everyone it was designed to save.
The chairs were red plastic, bolted to metal desks, and when the room emptied they stayed exactly where they were.
This article was inspired by Getting here - from tangledarts.org.