First of the weekly series for National Guide Dog Awareness Month, I’ll be providing some tips for emergency managers to check out and share with their networks.
Guide dogs vs Canes:
Individuals who are blind, visually-impaired or deafblind will either use a white cane or a guide dog to aid in their daily travels safely and independently. An individual using a white cane will encounter everything in their line of travel, chairs, tables, and potential drop-offs. A guide dog will traverse around obstacles smoothly to avoid contact with the objects in the person’s line of travel and stop at up/down-curbs. Any person that uses either a cane or dog will need to know how to orient themselves in space. Only 10% of the blind population are totally blind. Many will find useful ways to utilize their residual vision to assist in assessing traffic surges prior to crossing intersections, bright landmarks to find their final destination, shadows and even direction of the sun to know cardinal directions. Olfactory and auditory cues are useful for navigational purposes, such as the smell of bread wafting from a bakery. Canes offer tactile feedback such as grass, pavement, tactile domes to indicate the edge of a curb, etc and at times touch obstacles that have different reverberations for a deafblind traveler. A person using a guide dog still require the orientation skills but loose the tactile feedback the cane provides. Guide dog users provide verbal and visual cues to the dog where the person wants/needs to go; however, the dog can disobey commands if it is unsafe to move forward.
Here’s a great web site to dive deeper into the differences: https://www.cnib.ca/en/getting-around?region=on