Is Your Packaging Accessible?

Ensuring your packaging is accessible is the key aspect of inclusive design. This is the practise of creating products that serve as many people as possible – regardless of disability, age, gender or any other demographic.

According to Scope, there are 13.9 million disabled people in the UK - this is near one fifth of the population. But despite this huge number of people requiring more accessible packaging, many company’s fail to incorporate inclusive design when planning, which can reduce opportunities to sell their product to a wider audience.

The sense of touch is already used in packaging to help those with disabilities. Under law by the European Commission, medicinal packaging is required to use braille to ensure readability for the visually impaired. However, braille is not commonly used even among blind people – in the UK there are up to 20,000 people who can read it. So how can we use touch more effectively on packaging?

One alternative is the use of shapes and symbols to help consumers process information. This year, hair care brand Herbal Essences added tactile markings on all shampoos and conditioners in the US. This is used to help consumers with visual impairments to distinguish between shampoo and conditioner.

Making your packaging as visually clear as possible can help people with impaired sight. Graphic design features such as high contrast colours, large font sizes and shape graphics can all be used to help legibility. It is also important to think about the font style used for your packaging – although serif fonts can be more decorative, sans-serif fonts can increase the readability of long passages of text. Also, when placing text over a background image or graphic, make sure you use a contrasting font colour to make it easily readable.

Packaging accessibility may not be the first consideration when designing your packaging, but in doing so you will ensure your products are more available to use to a wider demographic and can help to increase sales.

We offer many options to make your packaging more accessible with both our label printing and bespoke tin service. Ensure your packaging is readable with full CMYK printing to ensure you get the perfect colouring on your packaging. Looking to add tactile markings to your product? We can emboss or deboss any shape or text into your bespoke tin packaging. To discuss any more options further, please contact us.

Sources

https://uxplanet.org/6-principles-for-inclusive-design-3e9867f7f63e

https://www.scope.org.uk/media/disability-facts-figures/

EU Directive 2004/27/EC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16984742

https://www.cosmeticsdesign-europe.com/Article/2019/10/10/Herbal-Essences-inclusive-tactile-markings-design-roll-out-on-World-Sight-Day

https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/serif-vs-sans-for-text-in-print