Signage & Information

A building speaks to the people in it constantly. This is the entrance; that is the toilet; the exit is this way; push, do not pull; the lift is out of order. Most of that information is carried by signage and other cues, and if a person cannot receive it, they are as effectively excluded as if there were a step in their way. A sign a blind person cannot read, a fire alarm a deaf person cannot hear, a room name in a language or a typeface a person cannot decode - each is a barrier made of information rather than concrete, and it disables just as surely.

The single most important principle in accessible information is redundancy across the senses: never rely on one channel alone. If a message is only visual, you exclude blind and low-vision people. If it is only auditory, you exclude Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. If it is only text, you exclude people who cannot read that language or script, and many people with cognitive or learning differences. The robust approach is to carry critical information in more than one form at once - visual and tactile, visual and audible, word and symbol - so that whichever sense a person is using, the message reaches them.

> Never let critical information depend on a single sense. Pair visual with tactile, sound with light, words with symbols - so no one is left out.

The worked examples are familiar once you look. A fire alarm should sound and flash, so it reaches deaf people as well as hearing ones. A lift should announce floors aloud and display them, and offer tactile buttons. A room sign should carry clear print and raised letters or Braille. A pedestrian crossing should give a visual signal, an audible tone and a tactile cue. This is the same curb-cut logic from Module 0: the redundancy added for one group - the flashing alarm, the announced floor, the symbol beside the word - helps many others too, in noise, in poor light, in a hurry, in an unfamiliar language. Information designed for the senses is information that reaches everyone.

Most signage is read with the eyes, so getting the visual sign right serves the largest number of people - and the rules for legibility are well understood. Four things decide whether a sign can actually be read: size, contrast, typeface and language.

Size must match the reading distance: a sign read from across a concourse needs far larger letters than one read at arm's length beside a door. As a principle, the further away the reader, the bigger the characters - and it is safer to err large. Contrast is often the deciding factor and the most commonly botched: the characters must stand out strongly from their background in luminance (lightness), not merely in colour, because many people cannot distinguish colours but almost everyone perceives light-dark difference. Dark text on a light ground, or light on dark, with a genuine gap in lightness between them, is legible; mid-grey on mid-blue, or a fashionable tone-on-tone sign, is not. The figure contrasts a strong, large, plain sign with a weak, low-contrast one. Aim for a high luminance contrast between text and background, and confirm the target value against your local standard.

Typeface matters more than designers like to admit. A clear, plain sans-serif with open letterforms, generous spacing and normal sentence case (not all capitals, which are slower to read) is far more legible than a thin, condensed, decorative or all-caps face. Avoid glare too: a sign behind glossy glass or in a shaft of sunlight can be dazzled into illegibility however well it is set.

Plain language completes the job. The clearest, largest, highest-contrast sign fails if its words are jargon, abbreviations or officialese. Say 'Toilet' rather than 'Amenities', 'Way out' or 'Exit' rather than a cryptic code, and pair the word with a widely understood symbol wherever one exists - a symbol crosses language barriers and helps people who read little or slowly. Legible visual signage is size, contrast, type and plain words working together; weaken any one and the sign starts to exclude.

For people who are blind or have very low vision, a printed sign carries nothing, however legible - the information has to be available to touch. Two touch-readable systems work together on good signage: raised (tactile) characters and Braille.

Raised characters are ordinary letters and numbers embossed so they stand proud of the sign face and can be traced with a fingertip. They are readable by touch by many people - including those who lost their sight later in life and never learned Braille - and, because they are still visual letters, they serve sighted readers at the same time, which is why raised lettering is such an efficient, inclusive choice for a permanent room sign. The characters need enough height of relief to be felt, a simple non-decorative form, and enough size and spacing for a finger to follow.

Braille is a system of raised dots, arranged in cells, read by touch - the primary reading medium for many blind people. On signage it is usually placed with the tactile characters so a person can find one and then the other. Braille has its own conventions of dot size, spacing and cell dimensions that must be produced accurately to be readable - poorly formed dots are unreadable - so it is specified and made to a proper standard, not approximated. The figure shows a tactile sign with raised characters above a line of Braille.

Two practical points make tactile signage actually work. First, you must be able to find it and reach it by hand, which makes consistent, predictable placement and a reachable mounting height essential - a tactile sign a person cannot locate is no use, a theme the next section takes up. Second, it belongs where information is permanent and needed by touch - room and floor identification, WC signs, lift buttons and handrail markers, hazard warnings - rather than on constantly changing notices. Provided as a companion to clear visual signs, tactile letters and Braille let the same sign serve the sighted, the low-vision and the blind alike.

A perfect sign in the wrong place is a failed sign. Where you put it, how high, and how consistently decide whether people actually find and use it - and these are the details most often got wrong.

Height has to serve both eyes and hands. A sign read visually should sit within the sightlines of standing adults, seated wheelchair users and, where relevant, children - which points to a height in the shared band discussed in Lesson 1.1 rather than up near the ceiling. A tactile sign must be at a height a hand can comfortably find and read without stooping or stretching - roughly around waist-to-shoulder height for most people. Typical guidance puts identification signage centred somewhere in the region of 1400-1700mm, and tactile information a little lower, but these are figures to confirm against your local standard, not universal law.

Position is about predictability. A room sign belongs on the wall at the latch side of the door - the side the handle is on, not the hinge side - so a person can read or touch it while standing clear of the door swing, rather than being knocked by the door as it opens or having to reach across it. Mounting a sign on the door leaf itself is a common mistake: when the door is open, the sign swings away and points at a wall. The figure shows a sign correctly placed on the latch side at a consistent height, clear of the swing.

> Put signs where people expect them - latch side, consistent height, clear of the door swing - so finding the next sign is never a puzzle.

Consistency ties it all together and is quietly the most powerful tool of all. When every room sign in a building is the same size, style and colour, in the same position relative to every door, at the same height, a person - especially a blind, low-vision or cognitively disabled person - learns the pattern once and can then find every sign in the building by habit. Inconsistency forces them to search and decode afresh at each door. Good information design is not only legible signs but a legible system of signs, predictable enough to become invisible - which is exactly where wayfinding, the subject of a later module, begins. Get the individual sign right, place it where the body expects it, and repeat it faithfully, and the building starts to explain itself to everyone.