Imagine coordinating your wardrobe in the dark. Every morning, millions of blind or visually impaired people reach into their closets to read the Braille-embossed aluminum tags sewn into their clothes or the coding system of safety pins they’ve devised to identify their garments.

Jaimen Brill and Asmah Abushagur want to give the blind and visually impaired community more independence in choosing their wardrobe and more confidence when dressing for success. They are in the process of forming the nonprofit organization White Cane Label to help the blind and visually impaired shop for clothing and coordinate their outfits. They are advocating for an interactive, talking Web site and standardized, Braille-embossed clothing tags made of cloth, not aluminum, to be sewn onto all garments.

The Web site will help offer clothing recommendations and will provide detailed descriptions of each item in various styles and price ranges. The Braille labels will include three symbols indicating the brand, color and coordinating style for mixing and matching individual pieces. A second label will include washing instructions in Braille.

Brill and Abushagur chose the name for their organization based on White Cane Day, Oct. 15, the annual day of awareness for issues facing the blind. The day is named for the familiar white cane used by millions of people.

Brill and Abushagur will pitch their ideas to leaders of the fashion world during fashion week, July 9-13, in Rome. The women will present their concept for White Cane Label at the Fashion for Good Roundtable in hopes of soliciting the kind of support that has brought attention to prominent causes like AIDS awareness and the anti-fur campaign. Brill and Abushagur will ask the industry to include Braille labels on their garments. They will also request donations of clothing and accessories to stock the Web site store they plan to debut in fall 2009.

“Fashion has the power to bridge or separate people,” says Wilma King, associate professor of communication in the College of Liberal Arts and co-founder of Fashion for Good. “I think the fashion industry is looking for innovative and sincere approaches to social responsibility. I have every confidence it will embrace and love White Cane Label.”

White Cane Label grew from a class assignment to develop an awareness campaign for a special-needs group.

“We thought all our ideas had to have been done,” says Brill ’07 (B.S. advertising and public relations).

“We Googled it and found out there was nothing out there for the blind other than aluminum tags and the recommendation of coding your clothes with safety pins on the tags,” says Abushagur, a fourth-year marketing major at RIT’s E. Philip Saunders College of Business.

Once White Cane Label is operational, Brill and Abushagur plan to extend the Web site to become a global community resource for the blind and visually impaired. Proceeds made by White Cane Label will go back into the organization and fund scholarships for the blind and visually impaired. Profits will also be used to help fight preventable blindness in children living in developing countries.

Source: This article is from  June 21st, 2007 Press Release from R.I.T