How Atta Yu is transforming the landscape for visually impaired Hongkongers
South China Morning Post
25th September 2026
How Atta Yu is transforming the landscape for visually impaired Hongkongers
Young minds, big ideas: meet five laureates of the AIA Scholarships programme, which was founded on the belief that education can open doors not only for individuals, but for the communities they will one day serve.
Kowloon’s Choi Hung Estate is one of the most photographed corners of Hong Kong, its rainbow facades gracing thousands of Instagram grids. But how do you translate those colours, structures and spaces into something that a visually impaired person can “see”?
Atta Yu Yee-ting, 22, a fresh graduate in occupational therapy from Polytechnic University, has an answer. Launched in 2026, CitySync – an initiative of the Inclusive Horizons project, of which Yu is a co-founder – is a community-serving cultural tours to Choi Hung Estate, built around a tactile map. Its surfaces rise and fall, with Braille indicating topography and different textures standing in for colours. As users navigate the public-housing complex, they read the map with their fingertips, assisted by volunteer guides.
“By touch, they can form a three-dimensional mental picture,” says Yu, “so that they have a much clearer sense of the place.” Her tactile maps offer a multisensory solution: 3D contours provide a physical “image” of the environment, while audio tracks narrate the history of each stop, allowing visually impaired people to “see” and experience their surroundings.
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