A Tactile Tag to Identify Color of Clothes for People with Visual Disabilities

A tactile color tag called “iro-pochi” was developed to meet the need of totally blind people who like to know the color of clothes they wear and also like to enjoy their own color coordination in their clothing. The tag has a total of 13 small tactile dots on its surface, 10 of them being aligned on a circle of about 30 mm diameter representing the color circle of fundamental colors and other three dots being at the center of it showing white, gray and black to simulate the color order system in color science. People with visual disabilities touch those dots with a finger and find a hole or one big dot made previously to show the color that corresponds to the location on the color circle, and consequently know the color of clothes. The design was based on the study and finding that blind people understand the relationships among colors, near or far, as sighted people do, which can represents the colors in a circle. The tag has been developed as a commercial product that is attachable to any clothing through some feasibility tests, and expected to provide color information of clothes in our daily life not only to blind people but to all the people in the future.