Understanding Nature Engagement Experiences of Blind People
Mengjie Tang, Xinman Li, Juxiao Zhang, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Zhuying Li · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790515
Summary
This mixed-methods study investigates how blind people in mainland China experience and relate to natural environments, a domain the authors argue has been almost entirely overlooked by Human-Nature Interaction (HNI) research and by accessibility tooling, which has focused narrowly on mobility and wayfinding. The work combines a pre-registered survey using the 21-item Nature Relatedness Scale (NRS) with 20 blind and 20 sighted participants matched on age and gender, followed by semi-structured interviews with 16 blind participants (10 male, 6 female; ages 22-63; 11 congenitally blind and 5 with acquired blindness; mostly massage therapists or students living with family in urban Chinese cities). Interviews probed everyday nature engagement practices, sensory strategies, companionship, family dynamics, attitudes toward nature, and expectations for assistive technologies. Two researchers performed inductive thematic analysis of the transcripts, generating 64 initial codes that were consolidated into 10 focused codes and three overarching themes: how engagement is structured by safety, limited environmental cues, and multisensory strategies; how strong emotional connectedness coexists with constrained ecological awareness; and what blind participants expect from technologies that align with their ways of engaging with nature. The authors situate the work within posthumanist and more-than-human design traditions and explicitly position assistive technology as a participant in nature rather than an overlay on top of it.
Key findings
On the NRS, blind participants scored significantly lower than sighted peers on overall nature relatedness (U=34.5, p<.001, r=.71, large effect) and on all three subscales: NR-Self (p=.003, r=.46), NR-Perspective (p=.014, r=.39), and NR-Experience (p=.003, r=.47). Six of 21 items showed at least medium effect sizes, including reduced enjoyment of being outdoors in unpleasant weather, less digging in earth, fewer incidental wildlife observations, lower perceived environmental agency, and weaker empathic concern for nonhuman life. Interviews surfaced safety as the foundational precondition: 10 of 16 participants restricted themselves to familiar low-risk parks, 10 depended on companions to go outdoors at all, and many reported family overprotection that further constrained autonomy. Without incidental visual stimuli, movement became 'linear and predetermined' and exploration collapsed into guided movement. Participants compensated through layered hearing-smell-touch strategies, with hearing dominant for orientation, smell signaling seasonal change, and touch providing the most concrete material confirmation. Emotionally, nature was widely valued as a restorative, companionable presence; ecologically, however, participants felt disconnected from environmental information and powerless to contribute to conservation. Expectations for technology clustered around personalized in-situ descriptions (concise labels for late-blind users; rich narration for congenitally blind users), portable wearable form factors, accessible nature photography, and minimal site-respecting installations.
Relevance
For accessibility practitioners, this paper widens the design brief beyond getting blind people from A to B in outdoor spaces and toward supporting serendipitous discovery, emotional resonance, and environmental agency. Concrete implications include: design for the dignity of risk rather than maximum protection, support spontaneous noticing of nearby plants and wildlife (not only navigation), personalize description style based on blindness onset history, build in automatic check-ins to ease family anxiety without surveilling the user, and use bone-conduction or open-back audio so assistive output never masks the natural soundscape. The work is also a useful reference for parks, museums, and urban planners considering tactile paving, Braille signage, or audio installations - participants explicitly worried about culturally significant sites being damaged by overly technical retrofits. Limitations to flag: all participants were blind (no low-vision perspective), the sample is mainland Chinese and may not generalize culturally, and the NRS itself was designed for sighted populations. Even so, the empirical baseline of significantly lower nature relatedness among blind participants is a strong call to action.
Tags: nature engagement · blind and low vision · human-nature interaction · multisensory · wellbeing · assistive technology · qualitative research · autonomy · restorative environments · outdoor accessibility