Is It an Accessibility Feature If Nobody Knows It's There?

An early morning flight out of Vancouver, bound for Toronto. The crew on that one were genuinely excellent — thoughtful, attentive, efficient, the sort of people who make an early start feel looked after rather than processed. So I’m inclined to trust the flight attendant who, somewhere in the shuffle of getting me settled, told me something she was clearly pleased about. This aircraft, she said, had Braille row numbers. For passengers like me. Isn’t that great?

It is great. I want to be completely clear about that before I ruin it. An airline looked at a problem — blind people have to find their seats too — and did something concrete about it. Someone specified the dots, someone manufactured them, someone installed them on a Boeing 787. That is real effort, real money, and real good intentions, which is more than a lot of the world manages before lunch.

So I asked where they were. On the overhead lockers, she said.

Here’s the thing about how I actually board an aircraft: my hands are not up there. Why would they be? I’m moving down a narrow aisle counting my way to a seat, and the information I’m reaching for lives at seatback height, where my hand naturally lands as I go. The tops of the seats, the aisle-side edge, roughly where a boarding pass says row 24 should be. That’s the part of the plane I’m actually touching.

The one place I am categorically not running my hands along, while shuffling down a packed aisle during boarding, is the row of identical plastic bins above everyone’s heads. I don’t go rummaging up there like I’ve lost my keys in the locker. Nobody does. The Braille is bolted to the single surface a blind passenger has no reason to touch.

Which brings me to the detail that actually makes this story, rather than just a grumble about placement. I only know those Braille numbers exist because a sighted person told me. If she hadn’t mentioned it, those little rows of dots would have ridden around in that aircraft for its entire service life, completely unread, helping precisely nobody. The feature was activated by a human with working eyes narrating it to me — at which point I no longer needed it, because I had a human with working eyes giving me directions.

And it leaves me with a question I can’t quite shake. Is it really an accessibility feature if you’d have no way of knowing it was there?

In fairness to Air Canada — and I checked, because I didn’t want to be the person complaining about something that turns out to be a rule — the overhead-bin spot is a permitted location under the Canadian regulations. Here’s the part that gets me, though. The very same regulation offers another option, in the same breath: the markers can go on the sides of the seats, above the armrests. Right about where my hand already is. Somebody read a sentence that listed both the spot where my hand goes and the spot above everyone’s heads, and chose the one above everyone’s heads.

And to their credit, Air Canada’s own accessibility plan already lists exploring ways for blind passengers to find their seats “without needing to reach overhead bins” as something it wants to improve. So I’m not even ahead of them. They know. I just worked it out with my hands in about four seconds, which rather suggests the four-second version should have happened a bit earlier in the design process.

None of this is a scandal. Nobody did anything cruel or stupid. It’s something far more ordinary and far more common: a feature that makes perfect sense to the person who installed it, right up until the person it’s for actually goes looking for it and finds nothing but luggage.

Put the dots where the hand goes. That’s the entire fix. Until then, I’ve got a Braille row number living quietly above seat 24 on an Air Canada 787, read exactly once, by me, after someone told me it was there.