Designing in the Dark: How to Help Congenitally Blind People to Design

During the eight years of my experience as a product designer, I have come across many challenges in design and other aspects of problem-solving. Some were relatively easy, others required more time and effort. However, there was one problem that bothered me the most, as it remained unsolved for years. It had nothing to do with my professional career or academics, but was rather a personal call that made me feel responsible as a designer. Today, I may have opened the door towards its solution.

My name is Aren Khachatryan and four years ago I challenged myself to design a system for the visually impaired to recognize color, interact with geometric shapes and use that same technology to perform design work.

In this article, I will explain my approach, challenges that I faced, and solutions in resolving this issue. There is also a video interview at the end, where I explain what made me think about this problem and how I came up with a potential solution.

The Problem

a. Describe color to a person who was born blind.
b. Help them further, by teaching how to use that knowledge to design a poster, book cover, magazine layout, UI elements or other artwork.

Research

Over 80% of all the information we receive is visual.

Admittedly, there are visually impaired artists who create amazing works of art, but nearly all of them were able to see at some point in their lives.

Thus, it is still very hard to convey the idea of color to the majority of people suffering from congenital blindness (see Tommy Edison on YouTube).

There are, already, various applications that will read out loud and describe an image using AI or image recognition software, but they will not allow for designing your own work (e.g. Microsoft’s Seeing AI).

Similarly, there are braille and full tactile displays, which elevate shapes from a flat platform to trace and mimic imagery; there are also flat haptic displays, that simulate texture and bumps to a touch, via vibrations on their surface. Some even allow to “draw” shapes on them, but none of that technology allows for color recognition and complete control over design tools.

Solution