The first thing I thought of when reading this assignment was what are some signs and/or instructions do I see when I'm out in public? How do those signs "make sense"? With that, I did a search for some examples of universal design for instruction and looked through a couple of pages and didn't find anything I thought would work for this assignment. I ended up searching/looking for images and instructions for emergency plans in case of fire or other emergency. I thought of this partly through what I saw when searching the Internet, but also because it is something I see everywhere I go.
The image (second image) visually represents the emergency plan for the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety & Health Administration. The universal design piece of this visual that stuck out the most to me are the symbols used. For example, the symbol for handicapped exit/access and indicating the symbol for "you are here." The second piece of this example that made looking and understanding this image was the instruction that came along with it. The image (first image) is a screenshot of the interactive emergency plan. To learn more about what each symbol represents, one can move his/her mouse over the topics to the right of the image and the description appears.
I think what makes this example such a good example of visual literacy in regards to universal design is that there is more than one option for viewing or understanding the emergency plan. There is the image of the floor plan with symbols, an interactive option where an individual can learn more about each component of the emergency plan and below the image and instructions (not shown in this blog post) are instructions in just text. This caters to all types of learners and universally understood.
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