The production and reception of assistance proposals between pedestrians and visually impaired persons during a course inorientation and mobility

Based on a detailed examination of video recordings of Orientation and Mobility lessons, this chapter explores the social production and reception of assistance pre-proposals between sighted pedestrians and visually impaired students at an urban crossing. We examine the combination of several resources that make publicly recognizable an embodied and embedded display of trouble. We show how passers-by approach the visually impaired person and introduce a confirmation turn –a pre-assistance item that is systematically rejected by the visually impaired student’s account. This rejection reveals another, contrastive setting, with its alternate set of relevancies, sequential organization, and categories. In this second context, the various attempts of passers-by to initiate help proposals become accountable interruptions of an ongoing exercise. This apprenticeship of a new alternative set of sensorial abilities bumps into the taken-for-granted visual practices that shape the common production and understandings of urban orders and disabilities.