• Posted January 5, 2026

How Dangerous Are Crosswalks for People With Vision Loss?

People suffering from vision loss might not be as endangered by oncoming traffic as you’d suspect, a new study says.

Folks with central-vision loss can judge the motion of vehicles almost as accurately as people with normal vision, researchers recently reported in the journal PLOS One.

Despite age-related macular degeneration, study participants estimated the moment when an approaching car would reach them about as well as folks with good vision.

"Our results indicate that even reduced central vision still provides useful information for judging approaching objects," said researcher Daniel Oberfeld-Twistel, a professor of experimental psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.

"People with age-related macular degeneration continue to benefit from their residual vision instead of relying solely on auditory cues,” he added in a news release.

For the study, researchers created a virtual reality system in which a person was standing along a roadway, observing a vehicle’s approach. The system provided both visuals and sounds of an oncoming vehicle. 

The research team recruited 50 seniors — half of whom had lost vision to age-related macular degeneration — and tested their ability to judge when the vehicle would reach them.

The scene was presented to participants three times: with only visuals, with only audio and with both visuals and audio.

"Thanks to our advanced audiovisual simulation system and customized data analysis, we gained an almost microscopic insight into how pedestrians use auditory and visual information to estimate the arrival time of an approaching vehicle," Oberfeld-Twistel said. "This goes beyond what we knew from previous studies."

Surprisingly, the group with vision loss in both eyes performed about as well as those who had normal vision.

Under purely visual conditions, seniors with vision loss tended to base their estimates on cues like the apparent size of the oncoming vehicle, researchers said.

However, the two groups still had comparable accuracy when both vision and sound were available, and there appeared to be no clear advantage from the combination compared to vision alone.

This doesn’t mean that people suffering from vision loss should start skipping blithely through crosswalks, the researchers warn.

The virtual reality scene was deliberately simplified, involving a single approaching vehicle along a simulated flat rural landscape and a straight single-lane road.

"Future work will therefore need to examine whether the findings hold in more complex environments, for example with multiple vehicles or when the vehicles are accelerating," lead researcher Patricia DeLucia, a perceptual and human factors psychologist at Rice University in Houston, said in a news release.

More information

The American Council of the Blind has more on pedestrian safety.

SOURCE: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, news release, Dec. 18, 2025