Braille Calendar
Time plays a huge role in our daily lives. Mostly timekeeping is represented in visual forms whether it be calendars, timetables or clocks. But what about people who cannot see? To aspire to live a normal life, blind people have just as much a need for calendars as we have, as they have to work within the same systems as everyone else. I was interested in exploring how you could use Braille as a tactile element in calendars. The Royal National Institute of the Blind estimates that there are 13,000 active Braille users in the UK. Most of whom will function within a familiy as everyone else – but what if the family consists of both blind and non-blind family members? How do you keep track of joint appointments, birthdays and so on? In this brief, I wished to investigate how to combine the two written languages; one visual and one tactile.
There are quite a few braille calendars on the market, but I have yet been unable to find a calendar that integrates both Braille and Latin script, and still leaves room for appointments and notes. My final design is a family calendar where both scripts can exists and function on equal terms, without one taking over the other. I have been working visually with the equality of the two languages as well, to signal that they are both equally valid. The outcome is a box of 52 weekly calendars for use in families with one or more blind family members.
There are quite a few braille calendars on the market, but I have yet been unable to find a calendar that integrates both Braille and Latin script, and still leaves room for appointments and notes. My final design is a family calendar where both scripts can exists and function on equal terms, without one taking over the other. I have been working visually with the equality of the two languages as well, to signal that they are both equally valid. The outcome is a box of 52 weekly calendars for use in families with one or more blind family members.
Process and prototypes
