What Makes A Sign Dementia Friendly?

What Makes A Sign Dementia Friendly?

When you are designing for a specific goal, simplicity is key. Our goal when designing dementia friendly signage is to reduce instances of disorientation and create a comfortable, supportive environment.

To do this we need to understand dementia and how it affects a person’s memory, learning and reasoning as well as the perceptual problems and visual impairments which are often coupled with dementia. For this article we will outline the key points that relate to wayfinding and orientation for dementia.

Wayfinding, Orientation & Dementia 

Wayfinding, Orientation & Dementia 

Memory & Learning

In particular short term memory is affected. This means that a person suffering from dementia whom has transitioned to a new home may not be able to familiarise themselves with the layout and structure of the building. Perhaps they will not remember where the bathroom is even though they have visited it recently or been shown it by other people.

Visual Impairments

Visual impairments can vary and hence different impairments can affect vision in different ways. For example some impairments affect recognition of dark contrasts while others affect visibility of light contrasts. There are some design guidelines which we can implement as best practice such as ensuring high contrast between lettering and sign background and using appropriate text heights.  

This image represents what a person living with dementia may see when they look at a loved one.

Visioperceptual Difficulties 

This refers to a combination of perception and visual problems. It can lead to misperceptions, misidentifications and hallucinations. We must take these scary effects into account and reduce the likelihood of them occurring as a result of our sign design by keeping the design simple, legible and understandable.

Contrast & LRV Requirements

Contrast & LRV Requirements

Colour is one of the most important aspects of dementia friendly design. High contrast helps those with dementia to differentiate text and pictures from the background of the sign. Different hues & tones create different types of contrast. 

We’ve ensured that our dementia friendly signage range is always of an extremely high contrast (Between 80 & 98% LRV contrast depending on the colour).

Tips for contrast:

1. Ensure a good contrast between the sign and the wall. We’ve ensured a good contrast within the sign but you must select a coloured sign appropriate for your wall. For example our white pine range would not be appropriate for a white wall and our walnut range would not be suited to a dark wall. Remember you can mix and match

2. It’s often a good idea to use a different colour sign for toilets. Our ranges have been designed to compliment each other and maintain consistency across colours through using the same layouts & icons.

3. Don’t use the same colour to highlight everything. For example yellow is often used to highlight hazards, do not use it in your wayfinding.

Size, Text & Icons

Tips for size:

1. The size of your dementia friendly signs is really determined by your text height and picture size and ensuring enough space to achieve those. You must also ensure there is enough space around the text and image to create negative space between the signs details and the wall.

2. You can use patterns to allow a larger than expected sign to be used without being cumbersome or intrusive. You should aim to keep consistency throughout the signage, so it’s important that your signs are adequately sized to fit longer room names without reducing the text heights.

Tips for text:

1. Letter height visibility is important in any sign. With room signage, you should calculate the text heights based on the reading distance. This assumes a user will be approximately 1 meter from the sign when reading. For dementia friendly signage you should increase our text heights by 50% from those of a normal sign.

2. Always use upper and lower case. Those with visual impairments may still be able to recognise the pattern of words where upper and lower case is used. All upper case or all lower case is not recommended.

2. Use simple recognisable fonts. 

Tips for icons:

1. Visual cues are as or more important than text on a dementia friendly sign. The cues are used more widely than text and transcend reading difficulties and even language barriers. You should use consistent imagery throughout your wayfinding, this will create a recognisable scheme that residents will find easier to understand.

2. Choosing pictures can be difficult as sometimes we each associate different items with different room types. For example do you associate a living room with a chair, a coffee table or a television perhaps? Try to choose the most obvious icon that will be widely recognised.  

3. Your pictures should be large, double the text height is a good indication assuming you’ve read up on our recommended text heights.

4. A common mistake is to use multi-coloured pictures which often do not meet contrast requirements within the picture. For this reason, you should use a single colour picture that shows a three dimensional rendering of the object.

Resources:
1. https://dementia.stir.ac.uk/design/virtual-environments/importance-orientation-and-signage

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About Signage For Care

Signage For Care is a sub-brand of Wayfinders, a signage company based in Dublin who has been in business for 40 years. We have been designing dementia friendly signage for care homes since the very beginning. We discovered a gap in the dementia signage market and decided to take matters into our own hands in 2016, which is when Signage For Care was born.