This article is an external collaboration by Philippe Humbert, a sociolinguist and senior researcher at the Institute of Multilingualism of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His research focuses on the interaction of language with social, ethnocultural, political, and economic power dynamics.Currently leading a collective research project on multilingual administrative literacy in Switzerland, he is also exploring the sociolinguistics of disability through a state of the art and a linguistic landscape approach. He occasionally teaches in the Department of Multilingualism and Foreign Language Teaching. He was a visiting PhD-candidate at Mirco UAM in 2018.
A station “for everyone”? Finding your way through signs, screens, pictograms and public-address announcements can be difficult for anyone. But if you are in a wheelchair, or if you cannot fully hear or see or understand the messages, the landscape can become an obstacle. Which messages arrive too late, arrive distorted, or do not arrive at all? Working with eight co-researcher participants, Gare lisible (2025) examined the linguistic landscape and soundscape of a train station to explore its supposed universal readability and accessibility.
A journey into a highly standardized public space
Train stations are designed to be universal and efficient. Universal, because the expectation is that everyone should understand how this public space works. Efficient, because people should not get lost or stuck in the middle of endless flows of users and wanderers. As such, European train stations are highly standardised public spaces, relying on thousands of norms that most frequent users find self-evident. Thus, universality and efficiency translate into social, linguistic and non-linguistic aspects that we are able to read, see, hear or even “sense”. Signage, general announcements in loudspeakers, big billboards, interactive touchscreen-timetable, braille inscriptions on handrails, apps on the smartphone… they all compose the linguistic land- and soundscape of a train station.
What happens when we ask people with diverse abilities, henceforth “disabled people”, to read and understand universal signs in a train station and find their way efficiently? Does its linguistic land- and soundscape prove to be “universal” and “efficient”? The project Gare lisible (readable train station) explored these questions through a short study in Switzerland.
Documenting a train station with disabled people
From January to April 2025, 8 people experiencing various disability were involved in collecting the linguistic land- and soundscape of a Swiss train station. 3 people were wheelchair-users, 2 people were blind or visually impaired, 1 was deaf, 1 was hard-of-hearing, and 1 had a cognitive impairment. Half of them were frequent users of public transportations, the other half being less accustomed. These 8 co-researcher participants had to follow instructions to find specific places in the train station, such as the train going to the city of Lucerne, a regional bus to the village of Givisiez, or the public toilets. They were asked to explain how they managed to perceive and interpret visual and aural messages.
At the time of the study, the train station of Fribourg was under serious renovation. This meant that usual pathways were temporarily closed, requiring temporary signage and alternative routes to reach the platforms. This setup enabled observation of how permanent versus temporary problems were managed on site through multimodal and multisensorial processes (reading, listening, interacting, sensing…).
We also gathered at university to discuss and share experiences and interpretations of their 4 documented journeys throughout the train station. Meanwhile, I also held conversations with public transportation professionals and consulted laws, norms and standards regarding public communication in Swiss train stations, with a focus on how disability is addressed in these institutional texts. I will not develop these highly technocratic issues further here, but it is important to note that disability discursively materialises in institutional texts, and that both public transportation professionals and people involved in defending disability rights consult these standards to organise their social actions.
“Guessing” directions in a complex system
While some co-researcher participants experienced minimal difficulty reading and interpreting signs to find their way, almost all had to make a complex inference at some time. Daniel, a young hard-of-hearing man well versed in digital tools, documented an episode where he found it difficult to read and interpret the landscape. Note that Daniel commutes every day in this train station, so he is what we can call an experienced and frequent user. At this stage of documentation, he was trying to transit from a train platform to a regional bus.
The picture above represents two pictures taken to find a bus going to the village of Givisiez. On the left, Daniel had to read the information found on his smartphone: there are two buses going to Givisiez, named B9 (departing from platform C) and B544 (departing from platform 22). He chooses the second option. On-site, he sees a signage indicating two directions, both using a bus pictogram. The first one is preceded by coloured numbers indexing bus numbers. The second is followed by texts indexing locations, among which “Gare routière / Busbahnhof”, which means “bus station”. At this stage, Daniel, like other participants, is puzzled by an informational gap between the app and the signage: one indexes a specific platform, while the other indexes two opposite directions for finding buses. As a result, Daniel must guess that his bus (B544) is not bus 9 in order to determine that his destination is on the left.
Since Daniel frequently uses the Swiss railway app, he was able to find his way by activating the geolocalization feature (see screenshot below, the red dot indicates his reported location).
This kind of complex inferences puzzled everyone. The linguistic and semiotic segments on the picture are the product of complex interoperable systems working together: buses and trains are organised by two different public transportation societies in this case, occupying different parts of the public space managed by various institutions. Thus, this example illustrates how much background knowledge one may need to mobilise to read and interpret signs and messages which are thought to be universal. It also shows that, regardless of disability, multimodality and complex linking of information play a central role in “guessing” directions. Moreover, smartphone apps are also part of that linguistic landscape, giving more personalised routes to those who are able to use them and can afford a decent internet connexion. As such, it is important to highlight that reading and understanding the linguistic land- and soundscape of a train station is highly embedded in routinised and repeated multimodal sociolinguistic practices, sometimes requiring extra cognitive efforts to “guess” the right direction.
Now if we include diverse capacities to this process, things can get even more complicated. Wheelchair users must pay attention to the uneven bumps and the steepness of ramps while reading and interpreting information. People who are visually impaired rely primarily on auditive and sensory references, using their smartphones diversely. It is well known in Disability Studies: disabled people need more time and preparation in everyday actions, especially planning a journey with public transportation. As we will see, anticipating potential obstacles also requires sociolinguistic actions.
The impact of physical obstacles on sociolinguistic meaning-making
The linguistic land- and soundscape usually communicate the right direction. However, for some participants, messages lost coherence due to physical obstacles in their way. As the picture below shows, a construction traffic sign on the sidewalk is enough to challenge or confuse a wheelchair user’s or a blind person’s route. Wheelchair users in our study couldn’t stay on the sidewalk to avoid this obstacle. Visually impaired participants got their white stick stuck on the obstacle and were unsure of their route for a moment.
Of course, these traffic signs are necessary to communicate risks to all users, including drivers, cyclers, and pedestrians. However, their physical materiality in the landscape affects some disabled people differently: it generates frustrations and forces them find a detour or risk their way on the road. As documented elsewhere (Prescott et al., 2021), these obstacles affect wheelchair users’ attention, to such a point that they may skip reading useful information. Despite being able to read and interpret the signs and messages, the three wheelchair participants sometimes missed – or misinterpreted – information. Their comments suggest that they had to pay attention to other obstacles or challenges, focusing their attention on architectural details. Consequently, they took the wrong way or wandered around longer. For example, one of them stayed on the wrong platform waiting for his train… until he realised the train was on the other side of the railway tracks.
This example shall let us reflect on how people and institutions write and materialise their “universal” discourses as physical objects that might occupy space to guide speakers “efficiently”. One could argue that the construction sign is somewhat universal (almost everyone understands there is risk ahead), but in such cases it is not effective for some disabled people who must adjust their routes.
Disabling the access to toilets with language and digitalisation
In Disability Studies, the literature suggests that digital and technological tools can either empower disabled people or generate exactly the opposite: exclusion. The most telling example in our study are the newly renovated toilets. As the picture shows below (on the left), to use the toilets, one must pay the equivalent of 1 euro (1 coin). No cash accepted, “card payment only”. Interestingly, wheelchair users were not blocked, because they had the Eurokey, i.e. a key that opens access to a lot of public places. This key was designed for certain disabled people, primarily those with reduced mobility or visual impairments. Possessing the Eurokey meant they only needed to read the wheelchair symbol on the door, which indicated the Eurokey lock.
For other co-researcher participants with no cashless option, especially the visually impaired participant (Thomas) and the participant with a cognitive impairment (Céline), reading and interpreting the instructions turned into a nightmare. Céline did not even try to read the instructions, but gave up at first sight, saying “it’s not for me, I would use other toilets”. Thomas, on the other hand, insisted on documenting the whole process (his pictures above). First, one needs to be able to read and understand the small message on the sticker (see picture above on the left) which states you need to go to a Selecta vending machine to “purchase a toilet access card”. This requirement forces users to scan the space and locate a machine approximately 15 meters away. Second, the Selecta vending machine presents additional payment instructions and asks the user to enter the number associated with the toilet card, so one needs to be able to find the card among snacks, candies, condoms, and sodas. Third, one needs to go back to the toilets with the toilet card and follow the payment instructions using a card.
The people who installed – and those who approved the dispositive – had probably assumed that, in 2025, cashless payments is the norm in Switzerland. For people like Thomas, who is in fact elegible for the Eurokey but has developed his own strategies with cash money, disability is further intensifies by such ableist – and more broadly socially excluding – infrastructure.
Conclusion: Enabling access with linguistic landscapes?
Even when “universal” signs are read and understood, their effectiveness appears to vary for disabled people in certain situations. Our study concludes with a series of proposals aimed at fostering social actions that could improve the accessibility of such train stations. Among these, one initiative builds its pedagogical potential on the collective co-construction of linguistic landscape studies, such as in Lenguas callejeras (Martín Rojo et al., 2023). To make the study Gare lisible possible, I produced a range of materials and trained the co-researcher participants in documenting the linguistic landscape and soundscape. By the end of the study, co-researcher participants were exchanging practices and tips: documenting the linguistic land- and soundscape of a train station helped them understanding train stations as “systems”. They also identified resources that were new to some of them, and reported feeling slightly more confident in conducting such research.
Moreover, as already suggested before the study, our exploration shows – once again – that disability activists are likely to master linguistic landscape tools, as a politicised documenting practice aimed at claiming accessibility rights. It is common for disability activists to take pictures or videos of situations in which their access is denied, often to denounce ableist policies (Parent, 2016). Working with speakers and integrating their diverse social and linguistic perspectives on a specific linguistic landscape allow us to engage in deeper political conversations, while potentially identifying ways to make that landscape more accessible them.
About the project Gare Lisible
The project Gare lisible was held at the Institute of Multilingualism (Uni Fribourg, Switzerland). Together with 8 co-researcher participants with diverse dis/abilities, Philippe Humbert has directed this exploratory research.
More information, including summarised and full versions of the research report, are available here in French and German here:
https://institut-plurilinguisme.ch/fr/recherche/gare-lisible-et-accessible
REFERENCES
Martín Rojo, L., Cárdenas Neira, C., & Molina Ávila, C. (2023). Lenguas callejeras: Paisajes colectivos de las lenguas que nos rodean: guía para fomentar la conciencia sociolingüística crítica (Primera edición: julio de 2023). Ediciones Octaedro.
Parent, L. (2016). The wheeling interview: Mobile methods and disability. Mobilities, 11(4), 521–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2016.1211820
Prescott, M., Miller, W. C., Borisoff, J., Tan, P., Garside, N., Feick, R., & Mortenson, W. B. (2021). An exploration of the navigational behaviours of people who use wheeled mobility devices in unfamiliar pedestrian environments. Journal of Transport & Health, 20, 100975. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2020.100975
