"I used to be Partially Sighted, now I am Visually Impaired."

The Problem: Bad labelling on food products. Why should this interest us as eyecare practitioners?

I came across David Armitage and his site recently whilst conducting some research for a lecture on the relevance of contrast sensitivity and contrast reserve when prescribing magnification to visually impaired patients.  This is what he has to say:

 

Hello I’m David; I am the creator of the Clearlabelling site.

I have had “eye problems” since birth. After many years working in the food industry for both small and large companies, in February of 2004 I took (very) early retirement, due to increasing problems with my vision.  To those who are interested in this sort of thing, I have retina problems, uveitis and glaucoma, plus a few extra bits and pieces thrown in for good measure.

However life goes on.

So after my retirement I decided to put my time, and my brain, to good use, and do something about a problem that has annoyed me, and other “visually impaired” people, for a while:  namely bad labelling on products.  As I have much experience and many contacts in the food industry, I decided to start there.  Perhaps some of us can not read the instruction on how to work the remote on our T.V. set, or manage to send text messages on our mobile phones, but I feel this is less important than the cooking or storage instructions on my pack of “Boil in the Bag Kippers”.  Which in spite of many requests for change, one supermarket still prints as black text on a dark grey background, not very readable. 

So is this a problem?

Well it can be when I go to the supermarket.  If you are “Visually Impairedâ€?, trying to read the cooking or storage instructions, and use by dates, of many pre-packaged food products is almost impossible.  Exotic fonts, strange colour combinations, lack of contrast and very small print are just some of the problems encountered.

The aim of “CLEAR Labellingâ€? is: To help Visually Impaired people, by encouraging producers and retailers to improve the labelling, presentation and packaging of their products.

Would it be so hard, just to remove the grey background?
This is only one of many examples, others can be found on the Clearlabelling web site.

So have we done any good?  Have we managed to influence the colour and design of food labelling?

Well we have had some success; one large food manufacturing company is taking us seriously, they changed they changed the background colour on one of their new products ranges.  We also managed to get one of the supermarkets to modify the colour scheme on its web site.  Other successes are mentioned on the site.

The future?

We would like manufacturers and retailers, when designing labels, to put as much thought into the needs of visually impaired people, as they put into designing modern eye catching labels.  It is possible to have attractive packaging that is also readable by us all. 

For more info see:
http://www.clearlabelling.co.uk/

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