الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 209 |  |  |
| | | from | 209 | | |
Abstract
The built environment is often designed with a focus on the visual elements, causing architectural visual bias. Consequently, people who suffer from visual impairment face struggles and spatial barriers in this ocular-centric environment. A child with a visual impairment can suffer from a disability because losing the visual sense can significantly interfere with his/her ability to function independently, perform activities of daily living, travel safely, and perceive and learn the surrounding environment.
Inclusive design is an approach that aims to include special children with the general student population by developing the whole system, including the built environment, to accommodate their needs. Although efforts have been made to include children with visual impairments in the educational mainstream, available design guidelines often miss their ”real lived experience”. General inclusive school design criteria are limited, and the necessary design qualities of space to cope with their impairments often miss the phenomenological, holistic approach. The thesis aims to introduce a developed theoretical design model for inclusive schools, including the visually impaired lived experience. This will be achieved through a mixed method, starting with analyzing the existing inclusive design guidelines and finding their strength of relationship with the visually impaired’s spatial perception attributes through a quantitative approach.
A questionnaire was distributed among experts in the field, and the results show how guidelines have a more substantial effect on certain perceptual attributes than others. The results were also lacking real lived experiences, leading to phase two. The necessary spatial qualities are extracted from visually impaired real experiences through a phenomenological approach. An in-depth interview is done with 15 visually impaired participants; transcriptions are extracted and analyzed through thematic analysis. The themes are later validated through a personal engagement experience and respondents’ validation.
Research Findings show and explain the four main themes that affect the visually impaired experience: stimulation of the senses, perception of safety, accessibility, and sense of place, and how they can be translated into design considerations. This research adds a layer to the existing guidelines by ”including” the visually impaired in the proposed guidelines extracting criteria from their own words and experience rather than just design standards.