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Braille sign unveiled at railway station

Stuart Woodward
BBC News, Essex
Reporting fromColchester
Stuart Woodward/BBC Samantha Leftwich from the Thomas Pocklington Trust. She is wearing a yellow and green floral dress, tied at the neck, and she has long brown hair. She is smiling at the camera, and is stood in front of a blue and white sign which reads Rail 200 as well as Braille dots which spell out the word ColchesterStuart Woodward/BBC
Samantha Leftwich said the unveiling of the sign was "very exciting"

A sign spelling out Colchester in Braille has been unveiled at the city's main railway station.

The blue and white plaque - which features tactile lettering - is part of an exhibition of artwork created by blind and partially-sighted people.

The exhitibition, called Do You See What I See?, coincides with the 200th anniversaries of both Braille and the birth of the modern railway.

A similar sign has been unveiled at Norwich station.

The exhibition - which aims to raise awareness of how sight loss impacts people differently - has been designed by the Essex Sight Loss Council and was funded with £5,000 from Greater Anglia's Customer and Community Improvement Fund

The artwork represents a number of different eye conditions, such as peripheral vision loss, and cloudy or hazy vision, based on descriptions from blind and partially-sighted people on the ways they perceive the world.

Stuart Woodward/BBC Jonathan Denby from Greater Anglia, smiling at the camera, wears a dark grey suit, light blue shirt and pink patterned tie, and wears rimless glasses. He is stood in front of two examples of artwork, one featuring a dog and the other featuring a sunset over a beach.Stuart Woodward/BBC
Jonathan Denby from Greater Anglia said the exhibition was "a super project"

Visitors can scan a QR code to listen to an audio description of each piece of artwork and the eye condition it represents.

Samantha Leftwich from the Thomas Pocklington Trust, which funds the Essex Sight Loss Council, said the unveiling of the Braille sign was "very exciting".

"It is tactile, so we want people to come and feel it as well as look at it and admire it for its beauty," she told the BBC.

"We would like to encourage people to use Braille and certainly tactile lettering more, so that we can also access the information that sighted people get from a visual sign."

Stuart Woodward/BBC A grey wall with seven large pieces of artwork on it. The top four pieces of artwork show a set of keys in four different colour backgrounds, drawn in charcoal and watercolour. The bottom row of images shows a close-up of green leaves, backlit by the sun, then the middle image shows a golden retriever dog but the image is fragmented and distorted, and the right-hand image is a sunflower in yellow but its leaves are black instead of green.Stuart Woodward/BBC
The artwork is based on descriptions from blind and partially-sighted people about how they experience the world around them

Jonathan Denby of Greater Anglia said: "Having this [artwork] in the waiting room at Colchester is a chance to showcase the role and contribution of blind and partially-sighted people in a rail context."

Mr Denby told the BBC the heritage railway sign was "the first time that some sort of Braille-related artwork has been put in place on the rail network", adding the signs showed "how important the rail network is to those people who are blind and partially-sighted in living their lives normally".

A similar art exhibition has been unveiled at Norwich railway station, with another due to be opened at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, in the near future.

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