The grey door on the grey wall

There's a door I keep thinking about.

Grey door, grey frame, grey wall, grey handle set in the middle of it. Somebody chose that. It got signed off, and somebody was pleased with it.

For a person with low vision it isn't a door. It's wall.

They walk past it. Or they feel along for it. Or they ask someone - which is the polite way of saying they have just lost their independence in a corridor.

And the building will tell you that door is accessible. The clear width is fine. The threshold is flush. It takes under 30 newtons to open, so it passes BS 8300-2 on the one thing most people think to check.

It just can't be seen.

Sight is not a switch

Visual is the second of my six domains. These six are mine, and post one says where they came from.

It covers whether you can see what you need to, when you need to - and where sight can't be relied on, whether there's something tactile or audible carrying the same information. Lighting levels. Contrast. Glare and flicker. Whether a sign can actually be read. Tactile wayfinding.

The question underneath it is short. Can you see what you need to see, or feel or hear it if you can't?

Most people hear "visual impairment" and picture total darkness and a white cane. That picture does real damage, because that group is small.

The standards themselves keep saying "blind or partially sighted". Two phrases, every time, because they're two different jobs. The Department for Transport's tactile paving guidance talks about people with residual vision reading colour and tone contrast. BS 8300 separates them all the way through.

Partial sight. A narrowed field. A central blind spot that sits exactly where you're looking. Light that hurts. A Tuesday worse than the Monday for no reason anyone has explained yet.

Design only for someone with no sight at all and you'll miss almost everyone in this domain - because they can see. They just need you to stop making it hard.

Thirty points, or it isn't there

Light Reflectance Value runs from 0 for black to 100 for white. BS 8300-2:2018 wants a difference of at least 30 points between a thing and the thing behind it.

Grey text at LRV 40 on a silver board at LRV 50 is a difference of 10.

It looks expensive. It looks considered. It is invisible - and it fails.

And it's a chain. The text has to contrast with the board, and the board with the wall. Break either link and the sign's gone. A glass sign with white lettering on a white wall fails twice.

The same 30 points does the same work everywhere else. Door against wall. Grab rail against tiling. Stair nosing against tread. Sanitaryware against the wall behind it, which is how you get a perfectly dimensioned accessible toilet where a partially sighted person can't find the pan, the rail or the flush.

Then there's size - and size is just arithmetic. 50mm characters to be read at 2 metres. 75mm at 3 metres. 150mm at 6 metres. Architectural signage with 10mm room names is readable if you have 20/20 vision and stand 30 centimetres away - which nobody does.

Sans serif. Sentence case, not capitals. Left aligned. Tactile characters embossed 1 to 1.5mm, not engraved, because engraved reads as nothing under a fingertip.

And put the sign on the latch side of the wall at 1500mm to the centre line, not on the face of the door. A sign on the door disappears the moment the door's open - and you've made someone stand in the swing path to read it.

Nobody gets taken to court over the lighting

I've measured utility corridors lit far past anything the guidance recommends for a space people occupy.

The working upper level for that sort of space is 500. That reading was 376 per cent over it.

The band for general occupied space is 300 to 500 lux. Anything from 750 up is over-lit for most non-task areas. I've walked into rooms with the word Quiet on the door that were brighter than the corridor outside them.

This isn't a comfort complaint. Over-lighting triggers migraine, it is a seizure risk for photosensitive people, and for a lot of autistic people it is pain. Nobody says that out loud on the day. They go home early and tell you they were tired.

Then there's flicker - which most people can't consciously see, and some people can't escape. Old fluorescent tubes run at 50Hz. Cheap LED drivers are often no better. The working floor is a high-frequency driver above 120Hz, and good fittings sit well above that.

Then glare - the half everyone drops. PAS 6463 Clause 11 is light, lighting and reflection, and reflection is where the findings are. Gloss floors, polished counters, high-gloss paint, a bare lamp sitting in a sightline.

I assess that from a wheelchair - and it's a different room from down here. Floor glare a standing auditor never meets is directly in my eyeline for the whole length of a corridor.

And transitions count on their own. Walking from a 100 lux corridor into an 800 lux room is briefly blinding - and that's a finding whether or not either number fails on its own.

So why does none of this get looked at?

Because there's no enforcement pressure behind it. Approved Document M sets lighting minimums, not maximums - it'll tell you 100 lux at floor level in a lift and say nothing at all about a corridor lit three times past the top of the band. PAS 6463 came out in October 2022 and is the first national design standard to take neurodivergent sensory processing seriously - and it is a PAS. Guidance. Not regulation.

The Equality Act's anticipatory duty covers it perfectly well. Everyone recognises a step as a barrier. Hardly anyone recognises light as one. I've never seen a claim turn on the lux level, and I'd be surprised if you have.

That's exactly why it goes unexamined - and why it's still there.

Where sight can't carry it, something else has to

The second half of this domain is the alternative, and it's mostly underfoot.

Cite the right document first. Guidance on the Use of Tactile Paving Surfaces was reissued by the Department for Transport in January 2022. The 2nd edition of 1998 that most people still quote is withdrawn, and citing it dates a report by two decades.

Red blister paving means a controlled crossing. It has meant that since 1981, and it must not be used anywhere else.

Get that wrong and you haven't failed to help someone. You've misinformed them. Red blister at an uncontrolled crossing tells a blind pedestrian there's a signal protecting them when there isn't. Where other red materials sit near a real controlled crossing, you border the blister surface in a contrasting colour and tone, 150mm wide.

Corduroy means hazard. Not "steps" - hazard, which is why it turns up at the top and bottom of stairs, at level crossings and at ramps onto tram platforms.

And the guidance is explicit that none of it works unless the lighting is even and the glare is controlled, so people with residual vision can read the colour and tone contrast. Tactile and visual get assessed together. They were never two jobs.

One more - and this one is mine. I'm profoundly deaf and I lip-read. A receptionist sitting with a window behind them is a silhouette - and I can't read a silhouette. 300 to 500 lux with the light on the front of the face fixes it. That's the Visual domain doing the Auditory domain's work, which is what happens once you stop assessing people one impairment at a time.

And before anyone says it

Yes, some of it is daylight and you don't control the sun. You control the blinds.

Yes, it's listed and you can't move the windows. You can still change what's on the floor and the walls.

And yes, some people genuinely want it brighter. That's the argument for control, not one fixed setting. Zoned dimming, a lamp people can switch on, one room deliberately held low.

What it isn't is subjective. Lux is a number. LRV is a number. "It feels a bit bright in here" is an opinion. A lux reading is a number - and only one of those survives someone disagreeing with you.

The cheapest findings I write are almost all in this domain. Turn off half the tubes. Swap a gloss finish for a matt one. Paint the door frame.

A tin of paint has never once been unreasonable.