Designing is helping with the way things are

Every year, for work reasons, I would end up at a two day trade show for the blind. It’s called, ironically or not, Sight Village. I haven’t been to it in two years now since I’m not in London hardly ever at this point. I miss it though. I miss it because it puts me in my place as a designer and as a human being.

As a designer you typically don’t think about this stuff at all.As a writer you don’t either. You never think that there is a massive barrier to people experiencing your visuals and words and sentences, or applications and internet loveliness. You never think that there is an imperceptible struggle to just have a sentence read to you by a machine in a very shitty, robotic way.

I’m grateful to have gone to this when I could. I should say that every designer and writer should have to see what people who are varying degrees of blindness, or hearing impaired, or just about anything besides fully abled internet types. They should go and see that the world isn’t perfect and it’s jobs as designer and developers of products and services to accommodate and help with that. After all we’re the ones who can help the way things are. Many people can’t.