Braille Band-Aids

I recently burned the second knuckle on my first finger — and that’s a spot that is hard to heal as you strum a guitar and while wearing gloves in cold weather.  A knuckle is always moving and when that injured knuckle is on your dominant hand, the pain pulses reverberate throughout your body with ever grasp and squeeze, cracking open the wound again.  Yesterday, I decided I couldn’t bite the cold bullet any longer and I bought a box of “Flexible Fabric” Band-Aids for “knuckle & fingertip” to protect my knuckle while roaming the world.  I was surprised Johnson & Johnson made such a specific Band-Aid for general public sale — I can’t remember the last time I used a Band-Aid, so I may be majorly out of the loop here; when I cut myself I just spit on the open wound and rub it with a finger until the blood congeals — but what took me most by surprise was the innovative packaging.

My Band-Aid box is sold with Braille dots!  In the first image of the box you can’t really see the dots poking out from the “knuckle & fingertip” description, so here’s a better, angled, box shot using reflected light from above to better expose the iconic Braille identifiers.

I believe the dots are supposed to spell out “BAND-AID” — but the dots for the “B” don’t make any sense. The first two dots make a proper Braille “B” — but the second two dots appear to be a mistake in processing and manufacturing because they have nothing to do with the letter “B.”  The next, single, Braille dot in sequence is clearly the first “A” in “Band-Aid” and the rest of the name is spelled just right — including the “-” dash between the words.

That sort of innovative packing — “B” mistake or not — must be applauded and supported in the marketplace.  Why can’t all products be “embossed” with Braille dots to make purchasing and usage easier for the Blind?

We’ve been advocating indelible Braille Dots on money for four years — and we start to begin to wonder against hope if companies and governments will ever be kind enough to act for total immersion and inclusion for the disabled instead only playing meek lip-service to actually making the daily experiences of the disabled easier to live in real time and under the honest constraints of their sometimes invisible disabilities.