Braille Clothing Tags, Fixing Sharp Edges
[Emmy] has a hundred braille clothing tags (also called color identifiers), made of a soft metal, that she wishes to attach to her garments.
The idea is: She can enlist help from a sighted person to initially match the colors of clothing to the color mentioned on each tag. Then, the corresponding color identifier tags can be matched with and then sewn into the clothing. This enables blind persons like [Emmy] to identify clothing colors for easier matching and color coordination.
The problem: These rectangular metal tags have very sharp edges (corners) that often jab, scratch, and occasionally cut her skin. Curious that this wouldn’t have come up in the initial discussions and usability studies for these Braille clothing labels. But no matter. we found a couple simple ways around this shortcoming.
Solution 1: So for this morning, I worked a couple solutions to blunt the sharp edges. One involved rounding the jagged corners of each tag with a Dremel tool. However, this turned out to be quite time-consuming; particularly since it also created burs which required a subsequent filing operation to eliminate.
Solution 2: This solution, which seems more practical in fact, is to bend each corner toward the rear of the tag with a small pair of needle nose pliers, being careful not to distort the Braille on the tags. This directs the sharp edges away from the person wearing the tagged clothing, and toward the clothing material itself, to which the tag is attached. This should stop the skin scratching. Plus, each tag can be modified like this in perhaps ten seconds, as opposed to the grinder solution which can take up to two minutes per tag. However, the risk is that the sharp edges aimed at the clothing may cut the cloth.
Ultimately, manufacturers should make these tags with rounded edges in the first place. But currently we can find only rectangular metal labels. So we’ll go with Solution 2 to address the issue until some company begins manufacturing rounded braille labels.
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