Fermer les yeux pour voir / Audrey Dodo
_ "Doing food shopping, an inescapable moment in our daily life, points out the difficulties of accessing information. Making a food graphic design which involves everyone was sensible, but quite ambitious, considering the diversity of needs. To this point, a valuable improvment is brought, thanks to Audrey DODO’s work, to the packaging itself and accessible tags. Audrey convinced us, and surrounded herself with the Comité Louis Braille partnership. Sight deficient people, captivated by this approach, took part in the definition of difficulties and needs, as in various necessary tests to the project’s development.
Congratulations to Audrey DODO for her project which she completed successfully with method and determination, contributing towards comfort in sight deficient people’s daily lives."
_ Christian Cordier, secretary general of "l'Amitié des Déficients Visuels" in Lyon and East center.

We belong to a society in which image takes into account well sighted people as being the norm. Marketing doesn’t escape from this, and for sight deficient people, identifying a food product is a daily problem. An alternative to Braille, not very often practised, “Fermer les yeux pour voir” proposes a new tactile and graphic language which takes everybody’s needs into account: blind people, partially sighted people and sighted people. Resulting from a partnership with the “Comité Louis Braille”, this project is based on concrete sight deficient people’s needs, a mixed public whose needs aren’t very well understood in the current food graphic design approach.
_ When brands think about the problem of identifying food products, they respond using braille. This initiative, even though laudable because it deserves to exist, shows that none of the studies have led to precisely defining the problems in order to resolve them. The Braille initiative of marking on packaging is more a wish to improve an image of closeness to the consumer than bring any real help. Indeed, full command of Braille is almost the reserve of people who have been blind since birth, who represent a tiny proportion of sight deficient people. Most blind people have become blind later in life and it’s difficult for them to learn this language. We estimate that only 10% to 15% of blind people have this skill. This represents around 8,000 people or barely 0,45% of sight deficient people. This percentage is in constant decrease. For partially sighted consumers, the current labelling only seldom resolves their needs. We notice a current lack of contrast and information prioritisation, and also a typographic heterogeneity. All this results from confused graphic design. Food graphic design only addresses the needs of sighted people. To bring concrete solutions, all graphic approaches have to be rethought.

_ The project « Fermer les yeux pour voir » follows this route and responds to the problem of identification of food products, by working on product labelling and the packaging itself. On the one hand, a sensory information system allows a person to recognise products whose packaging hide their contents, such as cans or juice bottles. On the other hand, package design for dried foods, allows a tactile reading of the food itself for identification purposes. An all-graphic design will be made according to partially sighted people’s needs. In this way, the project develops tactile information for blind people from birth and graphic information for partially sighted people. This new graphic and tactile design addresses the needs of all of sight-deficient people.
_ By extension, this project helps foreigners and people with reading difficulties, the sole visual aspect doesn’t always allow a person to determine exactly the product when he or she cannot read the text. For sighted people, a clearer graphic design sets up and brings an educational dimension, especially for children, by giving information about the food being eaten. At a time when the population is aging, this project involves everyone : the graphic designs of mass consumption products needs to evolve in order to respond to today’s needs.
_ In trying to bring more comfort into sight deficient people’s daily life, « Fermer les yeux pour voir » explores a more global problem. At the head of this project, Audrey DODO invites us to take a new look at disability, and to question a world which is customarily averse to change .

_ Discover the project « Fermer les yeux pour voir » from November 15th to November 30th at St Etienne biennial event, in the exhibition "Dedans, dehors, autour. États du corps".

2008 La Martinière-Diderot diploma / Audrey Dodo