The Value of Cribbage: Low Vision and Food Packaging

A couple years ago, The Boeing Company hired us to explore how disabled people experienced airline travel in China, India, Chile, and the USA. (follow the link for video).

The results helped Boeing, and may help airlines (we are talking with them!) but we learned so much about disability that we kept thinking, "How can we leverage that learning for better products for people with disabilities, beyond the air-travel space?" But we were too busy with day-to-day business from our regular clients to work on that question.

Just now, business is slow enough to allow our team to re-visit the issue. Thanks to a cribbage game, I learned just how problematic packaging can be.

I was spending more time with my low-vision friend, Fred, an elderly neighbor with whom I play cribbage when I’m not flitting around doing fieldwork. (I should say, "a quick-witted neighbor who regularly cleans my clock at cribbage, and who I have to ply with a couple glasses of wine just to stay even, let alone beat at this old card game!)

Fred was complaining about food packaging. He couldn’t read the cooking instructions with his expensive CCTV magnifier. Sometimes he couldn’t even find them. That caught my attention because we had been talking, at work, about all the stuff we learned on the Boeing project, and how someone—maybe the someone is our company—should apply some of that to consumer products.

So, at a lunch a few weeks later, my friend Carmen (Carmen the fabulous, by the way) of the Braille Institute sat down with me at lunch (we had met during the Boeing work). I told her about my friend, and asked what she thought about it. Carmen told me the same frustrating story: I think she ended up not cooking at all one night because she couldn't find the cooking instructions on the package!





The package shown here (with a hat-tip to Trader Joe's for their yummy French Toast) has instructions on the spine, and you can't read things on the spine with most CCTV readers--the kind of readers that many low-vision folks have in their homes.

Now, here is a case for universal design if there ever was one. Making packaging better for low-vision consumers makes it better for everyone. New technology like the Kurzweil-NFB reader can help, but to use that tool, you have to know where the text is. And the text likely has to be pretty good contrast (and not printed against a photo or some package-design thing) to work.

But how to get packaged-good manufacturers on board? More regulation would make them bristle (probably) but maybe some collaboration would help them understand that 18,000,000 new 65-year-olds are created every year (or will soon be, according to most demographic experts). Plenty of them—myself, Fred, and Carmen included—will have at least some problems with vision.

Designing answers will take work, collaboration, and shared learning. Lets find out who is up to the task. I'm going to keep playing cribbage with Fred (and, probably, I'll loose more often than I'll win) and I'll bet he will have more stories about how some products just don't work for him, despite the tech he has around the house to make his consumer products usable.