ACCESSIBLE PACKAGING +
WORLD SIGHT DAY
As consumers adjust to new purchasing methods in an increasingly online and delivery-based marketplace, packaging and its purposes have become THE crucial component of brand interaction.
With less opportunities to receive direct assistance from a store associate or ask questions about various products, consumers are left to completely trust the information made available on the package when making their buying decision.
But what if this information itself was inaccessible?
How would a consumer know which product to buy, what ingredients it contains, or where it was made? For those individuals with a visual impairment, this is a day-to-day occurrence that forces them to rely on the help of others to communicate details that, while available to the majority, are inaccessible to a greater percentage of the general population than you might think.
According to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), at least 2.2 billion people have a vision impairment that may or may not be addressed. Additionally, there are hundreds of millions of people living with an increased risk of sight loss due to various eye conditions, including macular degeneration, glaucoma and high myopia.
A visual impairment can be hard to notice, and many may struggle with it in silence for fear of being a-burden on someone else when asking for help to gather information from a label or package.
While the world’s population undergoes a significant shift as baby boomers continue to age, brands and producers of packaged goods will have no choice but to incorporate a range of accessible features into their packaging as consumers’ abilities to see, hear and move become more limited.
For visually impaired consumers, the use of braille in labels and packaging allows them to interact with the product and its information directly. While it is legally required for pharmaceutical products, the prevalence of braille in food and beverage packaging is less likely, though it is a growing focus among the world’s biggest brands looking to cater to the needs of this customer segment.
With this in mind, our team is making accessibility a priority as we continuously search for innovative solutions that help our partners engage their customer base in the most effective ways possible. Coincidentally, World Sight Day, an annual day of awareness to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment, happens to fall on October 8th, 2020.
So stay tuned as we roll out some initiatives aimed at highlighting the possibilities of accessible packaging, we promise you won’t be able to miss them!
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