Colour identification for visually-impaired people

Filipa Nogueira Pires is a designer and a teacher whose life experience motivated her to develop a universal system to allow visually impaired people to identify colours.

Known as Feelipa, what it consists of is, broadly speaking, tactile shapes, each one to identify a different colour. You’re probably thinking “how on earth can people be expected to identify a different shape for every colour?”

Well this is the clever bit. Filipa started off with the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue. Each are represented by a square, a triangle and a circle respectively. Just as colours are combined to form new colours, so the different shapes are combined to identify new colours. I suppose the advantage is that unlike braille, which I’m told is quite hard to learn, the colour code can be learned faster and more easily, especially by children.

I know it sounds a little complicated but apparently visually impaired children have grasped it very quickly. Filipa explains in TED talks how it all works. I think she explains a little better than me.