Category: Daily Living
Advocates ask fashion industry to support braille clothing tags; talking Web site
Public release date: 12-Jun-2007
Contact: Susan Gawlowicz
smguns@rit.edu <mailto:smguns%40rit.edu>
585-475-5061
Rochester Institute of Technology
RIT team will speak in Rome at the Fashion for Good Roundtable in July Imagine coordinating your wardrobe in the dark. It's not something Armani, Prada or Fendi think about when designing clothes. For them, a little black dress speaks for itself and doesn't need a safety pin or special tag for description.
Yet, every morning, millions of blind or visually impaired people reach into their closets to read the Braille-embossed aluminum tags sewn into their clothes or the coding system of safety pins they've devised to identify their garments.
Two women who met as students at Rochester Institute of Technology want to give the blind and visually impaired community more independence in choosing their wardrobe and more confidence when dressing for success.
Jaimen Brill and Asmah Abushagur are in the process of forming the non-profit organization White Cane Label to help the blind and visually impaired shop for clothing and coordinate their outfits. They are advocating for an interactive, talking Web site and standardized, Braille-embossed clothing tags made of cloth, not aluminum, to be sewn onto all garments.
The user-friendly Web site will include a questionnaire to gauge personal style, clothing recommendations and detailed descriptions of each item in different styles and price ranges. The Braille clothing labels will include three symbols indicating the brand, color and coordinating style for mixing and matching individual pieces. A second label will include washing instructions in Braille.
Brill and Abushagur chose the name for their organization based on White Cane Day, or Oct. 15, the annual day of awareness in the United States for issues facing the blind.
The day is named for the familiar white cane used by millions of people.
"If White Cane Day is the only single day that exists for them, then White Cane Label is pretty obvious," says Brill, who graduated in May from RIT with a bachelor's degree in advertising and public relations.
"This is a new idea; it's never been done before," she says.
"We are very confident that, once the idea is put on the table, people will begin to believe in it just as much as we do," adds Abushagur, a fourth-year marketing major at RIT's E. Philip Saunders College of Business.
Next month, Brill and Abushagur will pitch their ideas to leaders of the fashion world during fashion week in Rome, July 9-13. The women will present their concept for White Cane Label at the Fashion for Good Roundtable in hopes of soliciting the kind of support that has brought attention to prominent causes like AIDS awareness, breast cancer research and the anti-fur campaign. Brill and Abushagur will ask the industry to include Braille labels on their garments. They will also request initial donations of clothing and accessories to stock the Web site store they plan to debut in fall 2009.
The Fashion for Good Roundtable is sponsored by Alta Roma, the fashion association in Rome. The biannual roundtable, formed in 2002, brings together leaders of the fashion and non-profit worlds to encourage ethical and socially responsible practices. In January, the Fashion for Good Roundtable's focus on underweight models and eating disorders gained attention worldwide.
Previous roundtable participants have included designers Anna Fendi, Pierre Cardin and Laura Biagiotti, as well as fashion journalists, ambassadors and diplomats, among others.
"Fashion has the power to bridge or separate people," says Wilma King, associate professor of public relations at RIT and co-founder of Fashion for Good with Giancarlo Polenghi, corporate executive officer of Marketing Communication Mix in Florence. "I think the fashion industry is looking for innovative and sincere approaches to social responsibility. I have every confidence it will embrace and love White Cane Label."
Brill and Abushagur met in King's Public Relations class in fall 2006.
White Cane Label grew from a class assignment to develop an awareness campaign for a special needs group.
King approached her students with a problem a blind acquaintance had shared with her-the difficulty he faced dressing himself and knowing what to wear as the head of a corporation.
The women brainstormed ideas and checked the Internet. They learned that, in 2005, the World Health Organization reported 46 million blind people and
161 million visually impaired people.
"We thought all our ideas had to have been done," Brill says.
"We Googled it and found out there was nothing, period, out there for the blind other than aluminum tags, which have to be sent to a Braille printing company (and then sewn onto a garment) and the recommendation of coding your clothes with safety pins on the tags," says Abushagur. "It seemed kind of outrageous that nothing has been done to help the blind and visually impaired."
Talking Web site technology is expensive, costing around $2,000, according to Brill.
The advocates hope to make the technology available to more people by offsetting the cost with White Cane Label proceeds.
Once White Cane Label is operational, Brill and Abushagur plan to extend the Web site to become a global community resource for the blind and visually impaired. Proceeds made by White Cane Label will go back into the organization and fund scholarships for the blind and visually impaired.
Profits will also be used to help fight preventable blindness in children living in developing countries.
"Fashion is just the starting point," Brill says.
Two questions came to mind as I read this article. What is a talking interactive web site? These folks must never have heard of speech screen readers. The second question is do they know anything about Braille? They're talking about putting braille labels with washing instructions as well as size and color. They must not have a clue how much space Braille takes up and how large these labels would have to be. But at least someone is considering us and how we make decisions about our clothing.
I don't like the braille labels they get uncomfortable. Instead i have a certain number of cuts in my tags, for example one for blue, two for red, three for green. If the pants and shirt have the same number of cuts they match, if they are jeans any shirt matches with them.
Why not go with the RFID technology instead of braille. Sure it's not as common but it's the buzz these days and trying to get blind specific info included on tags that are becoming mainstream seems like a much better idea. But mostly it's an issue for women I guess. I just make sure to get pants and jeans in a neutral color (black) and then I can wear basically whatever shirt with them, + my clothes ahve enough subtle differences in cut, material etc so I know which is which.
Has no one told them that the tags are available from catalogs with print, stripe, poke-a-dot designations and a wide variety of color designations such as terquoise and mauv, not only the basic color range? Further more these tags do not need to be sent anywhere to be Brailled as they are all ready Brailled and printed I might add, when one purchases them. Also, one need not sew them in, but can attach them with small safety pins. Also they make it sound as if the blind person needs to send the clothing and tags somewhere to be sewn. That is rediculous as most blind people i know can sew on a simple tag or have someone blind or sighted who can do this simple job for them. Yeah, and washing instructions? You've got to be kidding. That's ludicris. The best they could do would be to put a number on the clothing that corrisponds to a particular set of instructions listed on line. For example 1 might be: "hand wash cold, then line dry, 2, might be machine wash on gentle cycle, line dry, 3, machine wash on gentle cycle cold, line dry, etc. There would be many many variations, but that is at least plausable. As for this complete ignorance of JFW and Window Eyes that is absolutely inexcusable as RIT, right here in Rochester is very close to The Riegional Center for Independent Living, The Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Center for Disability Rights, the Rochester office of the New York State Comission for the Blind and Visually Handicapped and a local American Counsil of the Blind chapter. I personally intend to try to do something about this as the Rochester Institute of Technology is right here in my home city. Wish me luck.
Good luck. I do think more information about blind people and what we need vs. what is already available is what they need.
good luck, and I just sew the alluminum tags right on my clothing, poking my fingers unintentionally with the damn needle as I go. lol don't mind it one bit
I suppose being able to go into a store and read labels in Braille so that you don't have to wait til you get home to sew labels in or devise a safety pin method would be nice, I just don't know how realistic it is.
I don't know. I would not, personally, go by myself to buy clothes. You may know the color, the size etc but for me I need confirmation from a sighted friend I can trust that the cut fits me, the colors go or just the over all impression of the outfit, you can read descriptions that sound great but then when you try the thing on it looks stupid. No labelling can really do anything about this, I wish there was a way to somehow use artificial inteligence of labels or something to tell you if it's good or not but it's practically impossible since we have different tastes and rely on people with different tastes. I think it's one of those things that blind people will always have to accept, having strong taste in clothing, at least looks wise, is impossible. You can control the texture of the fabric, how it feels to wear them etc. All of those things are important of course. But, well, like I said, I think there is always a visual element of how you dress that one needs output on.
Good Lord. Someone out there is actually thinking about the blind and all you people can do is complain about it. You know there are people that don't have sighted assistance all the time. So you do have clothes in your house, but you have to wait for someone to come over and tell you the color and shit. I don't know about any of you, but it could take quite a while for me to get someone over here to read to me. My parents work, cousins have moved off to college or whatever....so I'd be waiting a hell of a long time to find out some stuff if I wanted to label my clothing. Also, say I want to go shopping. Well like I said everyone is busy and hard to go shopping with sighted assistance. I personally hate going shopping with other people because I have to do shit on their time and I hate that. Instead of leaving to go shopping in the afternoon or something they think you have to leave and be at the store whenever it opens and I don't know, I just want to do things when I get damn good and ready. So if they did these label things like they are proposing, it would be great because I could go to the store feel the clothes, if I like the feeling I could find out what color it is and all that stuff. If I really wanted a sighted opinion on how it looks, go to a fitting room and try it on and then step out of the room and ask the sales people. They are honest I've done that a few times and they dont' just tell you everything looks good. A few times they've said the color really doesn't match my complection, or it's too loose.
Anyway, the point of this long ramble here is quit complaining. People actually wanna do something to help us, and it's this type of attitude that will turn people off and then think "well we won't ever try to help them anymore."
Excellent points above.
I liked the idea about the cuts in the tags. The problem with that I think would be if there r many different colors on some clothing. how would u deal with that?
good question
Wildebrew makes excellent points. This is always going to be problematic, unless you can shop consistently with one person who knows your tastes, and doesn't impose their own preferences on you.
I commend these people for doing this; I'm pleased someone is thinking of us, but that doesn't mean we can't express concerns and opinions about it.
I don't care about color labels; I suppose they'd be helpful, but I typically don't have trouble remembering what goes with what, once I own garments. It's the shopping part that is troublesome. It is tough finding correct sizes, when sizing isn't consistent from brand to brand. It is tough trying to explain to a stranger in a store what style you have in mind, at least for me. If this new website makes some of that easier, great! I'll certainly go check it out, although I'm a bit worried about what their prices will look like. (and let me reitterate that this is a concern, not a complaint!) I've gotten most of my clothes from thrift stores over the last ten years, so I'm always shocked to see prices in department stores, now.
I've considered trying to find someone to make cloes for me, though I know this will cost a bit, but it seems that it may be easier than dealing with the stress of shopping. (I really wish I knew how to sew, myself!) Plus, the clothes I tend to favor aren't exactly current fashions. *grin* I really like full skirts and shirtwaist dresses with full skirts, and they are difficult to come by. I've gotten clothes off Ebay, specifically jeans, once I pinned down exactly what size and brand I need, and if they give you enough info about size and measurements, Ebay can be good.
But I'm rambling now... LOL