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Designing Furniture With a 7:1 Color Contrast Ratio Makes a Huge Difference for the Visually Impaired

The 7:1 Furniture Collection, from Thailand's HomePro

By Rain Noe - December 10, 2020

For furniture designers, color is primarily about aesthetics; the designer chooses colors they like, or that they feel will have market appeal. But the designers at HomePro, a Thailand-based retailer of home goods and DIY supplies, realized that color could play an especially important role for the 1.3 billion people with visual impairments.

"When developing furniture for people with vision impairment, we discovered that 90% of all the furniture in the world uses similar color shades in their components, resulting in very low color contrast in each piece," the company writes. Consider what visually impaired people see around the house as opposed to those with perfect vision:

Not being able to see clear boundaries between an object and its surroundings can range from annoying to outright dangerous. Thus HomePro designed the 7:1 Furniture Collection, so named for the 7:1 contrast ratio recommended by the W3C (an international organization that articulates web standards) for the proper contrast between text and background on a web page, to ensure legibility for readers of various sight levels.

Applied to furniture and objects, this 7:1 contrast ratio makes a stark difference for the visually impaired:

"The colors pop out to the vision-impaired to compensate for their loss in vision contrast. Also, a specially-designed outline system is developed to provide the furniture with shape and identifies the function to its user. Combined with color-contrast design, the design system brings what was barely visible back into full vision.

"7:1 Furniture Collection visually erases impairment at home for the visual-impaired, while still appealing to people with normal vision, allowing everyone at home to fully live."

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Designing Furniture With a 7:1 Color Contrast Ratio Makes a Huge Difference for the Visually Impaired

Alex G

a month ago

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How many people did the makers speak with?

From my contacts within the visually impaired community, this “problem” is moot.

Would love to see where and how the makers validated this as a problem that needed solving.

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Dan Lewis

a month ago

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Where did they get the figure of 1.3 billion visually impaired. The WHO reports 285 million.

https://www.who.int/blindness/publications/globaldata/en/#:~:text=Globally%20the%20number%20of%20people%20of%20all%20ages,the%20first%20cause%20of%20blindness%20is%20cataract%20%2851%25%29.

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- Test Test
  
  Dan Lewis
  
  a month ago
  
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  The figures you linked to look to be 10 years old now, and more recent ones put this number at 2.2 billion (https://www.who.int/health-topics/blindness-and-vision-loss ). It is worth noting that this includes everyone with any kind of vision loss, including full and partial blindness, right up to those with some form of colour blindness.
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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.