One of the advantages of being blind, is that it enables me to live in a world composed of many and varied surprises. To take one example, when opening a can I am never quite sure whether it’s contents will delight my taste buds with Baxters vegetable soup (please note that other brands are available)! Or custard …! It is, I often think fortunate that my guide dog, Trigger eats a complete dried food, otherwise who knows what I might be enjoying the next time that can opener goes to work …
Today I popped into my local supermarket and purchased (amongst other items) 2 boxes of microwavable porridge and 1 box of Earl Grey tea bags (again other varieties of tea are, of course available)! On reaching home I found that I had 3 cardboard boxes and was faced with trying to ascertain what each contained. By placing the boxes together I discovered 2 where of the exact same size while the third was of different dimmentions. Given that I had bought 2 packs of porridge I therefore correctly concluded that the odd one out in my interesting collection of boxes must, of necessity be the tea. Had I purchased a greater variety of packages I would, almost certainly have required sighted assistance to determine what each contained.
Things are easier for visually impaired people than was previously the case. For example all medication now comes with braille labelling, which as a user of this medium is extremely helpful to me. Again most bleach now comes with a braille label clearly identifying it as such, although many other poisonous products, for example toilet cleaner do not.
There are solutions to enable visually impaired people to label products, for example a hand held device allows those with sight difficulties to record a short note on a plastic card identifying products which can then be affixed via an elastic band or string. However this solution relies on sighted assistance to identify the item in the first instance thereby enabling the VI individual to label it.
A hand held scanner has been developed allowing blind people to identify products and I am considering purchasing one. In the meantime I remain thankful that my guide dog eats dry rather than tinned food …!