Flooring texture is a big help. Many visually impaired or blind people use canes which telegraph changes in the floor. Those bumps on corners are to help navigate the change in grade and understand where to cross streets.

Consider using flooring texture changes as a navigating tool. Be careful though with patterns! Some beautiful tile patterns can be very confusing - they hide changes in grade, where stairs are, or broken pieces.

(My dad is visually impaired so my advice is based on what works for him)

I can only say the same as basically everyone else has said. I travel alone quite often (probably 12 stays in hotels last year) and in an emergency I'm not going to be groping the walls in the hope that they'll tell tell me which way is out.

I don't know how this advice interacts with the laws in your part of the world which are another matter but there are a whole series of problems with this stuff. First is the issue that braille is quite frankly a dying art and a lot of blind people, me included, are honestly pretty remedial at it. People will tell you it's alive and kicking, and sure, it is used, but watch out for people telling you that everyone knows it. There's a lot of politics around this, but the basic fact is that braille users are a subset of blind people to begin with.

On top of that, the people who can get something out of braille on a sign are the people who can see well enough to see the sign, but not well enough to read what's on it. That is fairly common as most blind people can see at least something, and it might make braille signage relevant in certain situations. The problem is you are now doing this for people who can see your sign, but not well enough to read it, and also can't much more easily see the giant illuminated fire exit sign.

As you can imagine you are now down to a group of people with such incredibly specific requirements that you could probably go around the world kissing the ass of every blind person whose life has been saved by braille on a fire exit sign and not get chapped lips.

Anyone who can't see the sign with the braille on it, or the giant illuminated fire exit sign, which would include me, will either have made other arrangements or is so dumb that they deserve what they get. Note that it is possible to be disabled and stupid, or in my case blind and three very big glasses of wine into the evening.

When I stay in hotels I either try to establish the fire exit route so I can solo it, which often means asking them to put me in a room where that is feasible. The tendency is for hotel staff to go into cripple mode and put blind people in a room with lots of handrails in the bathroom, which is weird and not that helpful (I'm a physically fit 41 year old woman and I don't need an extra high toilet seat especially as I am only five feet tall and generally do not pack mountaineering equipment in my overnight bag.) What's much more useful is to put me in the room next to the elevators and emergency stairs especially if the emergency stairs actually represent a faster route to the bar as is sometimes the case.

If it's completely non feasible to be near the emergency exit, then I will make damn sure that they know I am there, where I am, and that in an emergency I will be sitting there trying not to think about movies like Towering Inferno while I wait for a member of staff to turn up. During one false alarm I sat there amidst howling sirens for twenty minutes before I managed to raise someone on the phone. Being blind is when you find yourself calling the front desk of the building you're in to remind them you exist.

I guess you could do something with tactile floor coverings but in the end it's much more about people than things.

I am a job coach for blind and VI clients, one of the ways I teach clients it to remember where the exits are in the event of emergency. we practice until the client is comfortable with the route. once outside the building we work on where to go to be safely away from the building in such events

A tactile sign probably won't be read in an emergency. This is because:

• A sighted person can see a sign and read it as they approach it. A blind person needs to spend time looking for it because signs tend not to be in the same place in every building.

• It's an emergency, so a blind person probably won't take the time to read something when their priority is evacuating a building.

• If a blind person is alone, rather than trying to find the nearest exit, some people prefer using an exit near where they would normally enter or exit the building so they know where they are when they reach the street.

if it's your responsibility to organize the braille signage, please try to ensure that the braille is both legible and correct. Many companies that create and install braille signage have very little experience with braille.