The blind and visually impaired make up approximately 3% of the population of North Carolina. Despite this, public transit in cities like Charlotte are nearly impossible to navigate for these people. Sidewalk’s end without warning, people are turned away from rideshare drivers due to their service animals, and buses are inconsistent. This issue is what I have chosen to explore in my project. 

     The overall branding for my products was designed to stand out both to sighted and low vision people, incorporating complementary colors with high contrast. The name of my organization is Designer’s Lens. The logo features a design resembling an eye with three lower eyelashes. Creatively, I wanted to maintain a friendly approachable shape language, incorporating rounded edges and circular design elements. My products are designed to be appealing to both the visually impaired community, as well as the sighted people who may knowingly or unknowingly interact with them in their daily lives. 

My first designed product is a series of 12 poster designs, meant to appeal to sighted viewers. They maintain the same orange and blue color palette with a white background and a geometric pattern. The text on each is different and they are all hard to read for a number of different reasons. The text on each poster reads “Can you read this? People with Blindness and/or Low Vision can have difficulty reading posters like this.” Featured at the bottom of each poster is a QR code printed separately on sticker paper to be placed on each poster, to be able to highlight different foundations and organizations fighting to learn more about blindness and the conditions that cause it. In our final showcase, these posters are displayed in two ways. The first are three posted up on the walls. The second is a small booklet featuring all 12 of the different designs. The purpose of these posters is to get the viewer thinking about the things they take for granted being sighted, and how accessibility is about more than just adding a ramp to a bus. These posters are meant to go up in buses and bus terminals, light rail stations, and other community spaces related to transit. This product is designed to bring awareness to an invisible disability that affects a large part of the population. 

     The second product I produced is a kit to be sent out to those with low vision, and in particular those with service dogs. Included in the kit are a number of items both specifically designed for the visually impaired, as well as just good to have while traveling. First are two sets of cards, one for Uber and one for Lyft, that lay out each app’s policies on service animals, to hand out to any rideshare drivers attempting to deny them a ride due to their service animal. Next is a packet of plastic booties that can be worn by the service dogs to avoid them tracking dirt into the car. There is also a tote bag with textured and labeled pockets for the two card decks to give them an easier time finding the right deck. There is also a t-shirt with the Designer’s Lens logo. Finally, there is a travel sized hand sanitizer again with Designer’s Lens branding.

     The third product I designed is a social media campaign that serves two purposes: to notify the visually impaired community of road and sidewalk closures, and to provide the sighted community with information about blindness and its causes, providing links to the same organizations as the posters. Visually they are softer in color than the other two products, using more pastel background colors, but still maintaining the signature Designer’s Lens blue and orange, though featuring more black than the other products so as to grab attention easier on a platform such as Instagram.

     The visually impaired community is often overlooked when it comes to accommodations in the United States. Currently, blind and vision impaired folk have one primary means of transportation, Paratransit Service. This service is often regarded as being difficult to find a driver who can be relied on for consistent transport, such as for work. This is a good service when it works, but looking beyond that, how are visually impaired people supposed to go places like the store, the park, or any of the other experiences people participate in outside of their work schedule? Unfortunately, until we begin to prioritize the walkability of cities, the next best thing we can do is help make the means of transit that we have more accessible to those society too often glosses over.