Research for visual impaired packaging

Social issue:Visual impaired
Visual impairment (or vision impairment) is vision loss (of a person) to such a degree as to qualify as an additional support need through a significant limitation of visual capability resulting from either disease, trauma, or congenital or degenerative conditions that cannot be corrected by conventional means, such as refractive correction, medication, or surgery.

General marketing

An example of packaging issues which can arise for colour blind people is the current trend of supermarkets to mark up ready meals with a ‘traffic light’ system to advise customers of the levels of fat, salt, carbohydrate etc. contained within a specific product. Most choose to mark high levels of each component in red, medium levels in orange and low levels in green, so that a ‘wheel’ of colour is produced designed to show at a glance the average levels of each component within the product. Such a colour wheel is practically worthless to many colour blind people who are likely to ‘see’ all the colours of the wheel as the same colour.
Colour blind people need to rely upon written product information to decide whether or not the product is for them, so the ‘at a glance’ element of this kind of product marking is useless for about 4.5% of the people looking at the product (assuming 50% of the customers are male and 50% female).
Usually written product information is also included on the packaging and the colour blind may need to seek this out, but this example demonstrates how little care is generally taken by industry to maximise the exposure of their products to the whole of their intended market. By giving due consideration to the needs of the colour blind, especially in areas of the retail sector where products are heavily biased towards males, retailers could improve sales with the proper colour blind-friendly marketing advice.

Product packaging and placement
The images below show how difficult it is for the colour blind to pick out products on supermarket shelves by colour alone and they also demonstrate how much of an impact blue and yellow can have on the buying choices of the colour blind. As a colour blind person, would you automatically be drawn to the blue product on the middle of the top shelf on the right simply because you can easily identify it? Would it then become your product of choice just because you know where it can be found on the shelf?

Normal Vision

Packaging designs for the visually impaired

Perhaps not packaging but a good example of addressing the social issue
Bowl design

Tai Kuang-chin, who designed the Heat Conduction Bowl, was quoted in the press release as saying he was inspired by observing the needs of the visually impaired people in their daily lives. Tai has volunteered at the Taiwan Foundation for the Blind for several years.
"I was pleased to hear I had made the list of winners and especially appreciate the help from the visually impaired," said Tai.
When people with visual impairments pour liquid, they have to put their fingers at the edge of the bowl or cup to know how much to pour, said Tai. But if they pour hot tea, they cannot use their fingers. Tai's bowl, which has metal inlays with heat conduction rods, allows users to feel the level of hot water by touching scales on the outside of the bowl without burning themselves.

More research to be done however this is a great packaging design site, fully recommend checking it out-http://www.packagingdesignarchive.org/archive/browse_by_property/51/tactile%20packaging