Just as an FYI, there is a place in Singapore called the Enabling Village in Lengkok Bahru, a small area in Redhill:

Apart from being pretty, it also has some nifty features that support people with disabilities of all types:

1. Barrier-free access

Plenty of care was put into this, with ramps built with a gradient gentle enough for manual and motorised wheelchairs. Lifts are also in place in every building, and for every floor.

2. Tactile floor and braille signs for the blind

You might've seen these at MRT stations — they're actually to help guide blind passengers with canes. Long bars and block tiles direct users to key locations like toilets, while these round bumps alert them to potentially-dangerous areas like the edge of the platform, or a traffic crossing.

At the village, washroom doors and staircase railings have braille signs so that the blind can move around the compound independently.

3. Hearing loops

These are systems built into buildings to facilitate better hearing for the deaf through cutting out unwanted background noise. They do this by feeding signals into a user's hearing aid, and also provide a direct channel for sound from microphones to the hearing aid.

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But anyway, we're not here to talk about the Enabling Village, cool as it is — we're here to share that a person with disabilities' journey to the Village will now be slightly easier, thanks to some small adjustments made to the walking paths from the nearest MRT station — Redhill:

1. Rest stops with benches on the way, so folks who get tired can sit down for a short while on their way to the Village:

2. Clear markings along the edges of the path so those with partial blindness can see it easily:

3. More signs above that point to the Village, designed by Pathlight artists with autism and related challenges:

In a Facebook post announcing these changes, the Land Transport Authority said it worked with SG Enable, a government-established and supported agency for people with disabilities, to improve accessibility of the Village from public transport.

All stuff that could quite easily be done at all our MRT stations, and also — with regard to the features in the Enabling Village — in all our buildings in Singapore.

Someday, hopefully!

You can see the LTA's Facebook post here: