Flushed Away: A Blind Experience Review of Public Restrooms

This is part of a series of posts on various experiences that are vastly different for the blind and low vision versus for those who are fully sighted. As part of this process, I will also rate these experiences on a 5-star rating scale, as inspired by noted author and content creator John Green and his Anthropocene Reviewed. On his podcast and in his new book of the same title, Green rates and reviews items and other things that are unique to this current “human” era of the world. These include Diet Dr. Pepper, the Internet, teddy bears, and Googling strangers among other things.

The concept of the public restroom as we might recognize them today, have been around for a long time, first appearing in some of the bigger cities in Europe in the mid to late 1800s These would have included running water and even flushable toilets. In considering what those restrooms would have been like, I imagine that in their simplicity, that they’d likely have been more accessible to the blind than what we have today, at least in my experience.

To understand the blind experience with any public restroom, especially a brand new one that they have never been in before, I want you to imagine putting on a blindfold and walking into a maze, full of permanently mounted, hard objects that all feel cool and smooth to the touch but also might contain fluids that one definitely would not want to stick their hands into. Oh, and also, there are strangers moving about or standing in front of a urinal or a sink or maybe its a paper towel dispenser they are using. Who knows? Oh, I almost forgot , you also are trying not to hit these hopefully, kind people with your white cane but you need it to make your way through the previously mentioned hard, smooth surfaces. Then, if you are lucky and you run the gauntlet correctly, you find a urinal or toilet and where do you put your cane safely so it doesn’t fall over? No idea. After doing your business, then you have to walk the labyrinth in reverse and hopefully find the sink to wash your hands and that’s a whole different adventure. Where’s the hand soap? Where do you dry your hands? It’s different in every bathroom so your guess is literally as good as mine. By the time you exit the bathroom, you have so much anxiety that you want to vomit and your knee hurts from banging into that pointless half wall that sticks out in every public bathroom that I can remember.

The above experience is pretty much how it goes every single time for me, unless it is a single person restroom. Those are still hard to figure out where things are, but at least the variables are cut way down and hopefully, no one else is already in there when you go in. That’s just a recipe for an awkward encounter for everyone involved. What’s the solution for us blind and low vision folks? I have no real ideas. The invention of the third option, the family restroom has been very much appreciated, because my wife or kids can at least come in and show me the layout. Other than that, it’s just an anxiety-riddled experience that I wish were easier.

I give the modern American public restroom, from the blind experience at least, 1 out of 5 stars.