A study has found that Echolocation can improve the navigation skills of Blind and Partially Sighted people. Echolocation is used throughout the animal kingdom to help with navigation.
For disabled people, it is important to have a multitude of solutions, enabling the choice of solution that best fits them and the situation. For example, Echolocation will not help if you have hearing loss or are in a noisy environment. However, this is a welcome additional method for navigating.
Dr Lore Thaler, of Durham University, said the results suggest that the ability to learn click-based echolocation is not strongly limited by age or level of vision. This has positive implications for the rehabilitation of people with vision loss or in the early stages of progressive vision loss.