On Application Of Toys For Visually Handicapped Children Under The Guidance Of Universal Design

Toys always play an important role in the children’s daily life. A good toy isnot only a good friend to a child, but also a good assistant to his parents. With therapid development of economy, the kind of the toys for children is constantlyupdated as well. But for a long time, the majority of toys have been designed justfor healthy children; a great number of the disabled ones are likely to be ignored,which urges the disabled children to cater for the normal ones in the toys whichare not reasonable to them.Time when the concept of universal design goes into China is very short,but his spread and recognition has increased rapidly in education circles and de-sign community. That is to say, the products and environment by the principle ofuniversal design will have huge demand in the near future. Universal design is toconstruct a three-in-one social environment inclusive of equality, care and har-mony, full of human sympathy. The products developed based upon the guidanceof universal design ideology can often be used by all the users with different agesand abilities. In line with the principle of universal design, Toys are designed forhealthy children, at the same time, to take into account the special needs of vi-sually impaired children, rather than being treated as an isolation matter. For onething, it is comprehensively beneficial to enterprises; for the other thing, it is alsohelpful to move forward the healthy development of the community of visuallyimpaired children.In this thesis, the author firstly proceeds to the analysis of physiological andpsychological feature for normal children and visually handicapped ones to fig-ure out the similarities and differences between two groups. Secondly, the authortakes the universal design theories and the seven principles as the guiding ideas,combines the flaws of toys in design in terms of form, structure, function andmaterial, etc, and concludes a series of toys’ designing strategy common to both the normal children and visually handicapped ones. Ultimately, the author, facingtowards Baoji Special Education School in Shaanxi Province, has completed thefeasible designs for normal and visually handicapped children’s toys to apply theuniversal design ideas, thus implementing commonality of toys to normal child-ren and visually impaired ones.In the detailed designing of universal toys for normal and visually handi-capped children, a number of considerations have to be taken into account, in-cluding fairness, flexibility, simplicity, and error tolerance, meanwhile, increas-ing the elasticity in operation of the toys’ structure, the abundance in the usage,user’s safety, the definition of color contrast, the diversification of materials andso on as far as possible to satisfy different needs of all children in physiology andpsychology, to endow the toys not only entertainment, but a new meaning ineducation, even the adjuvant therapy for them.In this thesis, through investigating the field of normal and visually handi-capped children’s toys design, the author not only enriches the application ofuniversal design ideology, but also adds a new perspective on comprehending thevarious elements to make the people, things, environment and the collection ofthe system in design more humanized. At last, this thesis enriches the connota-tion of universal design as well as is the first step about the application of uni-versal design for China Toy Industry and contributes to creating beautiful andharmonious society.