(no subject)

[hartmans]

I'm continuing to look forward to moving into the new apartment. Last week I got cable (and of course net installed. I also had a desk delivered to replace the one that is falling apart. I have movers scheduled for next Wednesday. I guess I should start packing; I have little enough stuff that I'll be fine so long as I start this weekend. The first phase, which I have started, is throwing away stuff not worth moving.

I'm going through looking at a new solution for dealing with clothes. Currently I have braille labels sewn into most clothes. This provides a serial number and an indication of light/medium/dark for washing. Unfortunatly the label tape I've been using is no longer sold. That's not surprising; normal braille labelers and braillers both fail to deal with it. You end up needing to have a soft metal sheet to hold it in position with the brailler to actually label the tape. Also, it is relatively hard to sew, and generally sucks. So it is unsurprising that it is no longer marketed. I think I'm mostly going to give up on having serial numbers for clothes; I don't own much that doesn't match with jeans, which is the only reason I'd need serial numbers. I'll have to be careful about dress clothes. It's surprising how few solutions have come along in the last 10 years for blind people dealing with clothes and that none of them actually seem to work. The most promising solution seems to be scanning UPC codes or other bar codes attached to the clothes. Even that is not quite ready for prime time yet.

As usual when looking at assistive products I found some amazingly useless and poorly marketed items. My favorite from this time around was a series of tactile dots you could attach to things. The product is probably useful but the description was perhaps overly imaginative. They proposed these dots would be ideal for labeling furnature. "Yep, that's a chair." I guess there are situations where furnature is identical accept for color, but they seem rare and for the most part avoidable.

Comments

[jered]

The promise of RFID! Not only will you be able to tell information about your clothing, but so will the stores you walk into. "Greetings, Mr. Hartman. We see that you're enjoying your blue flannel shirt. Can we interest you in a red one?"

[dariaphoebe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same thing, and make the same snide comment:-\

[hartmans]

I don't think RFID is there yet for this use case. I think it will be in a few years. My understanding is that it works for crates of stuff but not so much individual stuff so much. Also, software and hardware pricing is targeted at well the world's largest retailer not at me.

maybe useless sugestion

[noiseinmyhead.livejournal.com]

What about using different fabircs themselves as lables, ie silk or denim tags to show washablity levels or different sizes of tags to denote colors?

Simplify

[(Anonymous)]

Cote-style. For a few years he wore only one outfit: a black t-shirt with green parachute pants. I assume there were several identical pairs.

Some things are tactically obvious: dress shirts versus polo versus t-shirt, slacks versus jeans. I'd recommend only owning stock clothes that will always match using only tactile sensations. The basic rule is this: all non-tacticle distinguishing features shall have a tacticle distinguishing feature in the hartmans wardrobe. Examples:

a. all dress shirts are white; if you want variety, only pick one other color (like blue) and use a different fabric such as microfiber or silk. But if you only wear dress shirts with black wool slacks, they will always match so it doesn't matter what color you pick.

b. all wool slacks are black; this is pretty standard. I don't have any non-black wool slacks. (dress shirt iff wool slacks)

c. all kakhis are white; they match better this way, I had some brown ones but they don't seem to match many things.

d. all polo shirts match white kakhis, this leaves it pretty open so that you don't care what color it is, only if it matches. (polo iff kakhis)

e. all jeans are blue - non-sequitur.

f. all t-shirts match blue-jeans (blue-jean iff t-shirt), this is almost any t-shirt

g. use a female or fashionable male to determine matching criteria; your average male is likely to give you bad advice.

Following the basic rule of tacticle distinguishment should allow you to create a variable yet matching wardrobe without the necessity of clumsy braille additions to your garments.

--arley

Re: Simplify

[hartmans]

Yeah, this is clearly the correct answer and is mostly what I'm doing.
I still want a solution for labeling some things. For example, taking the Longhorn shirt to an Apple conference would probably be a mistake. Shirts that say tasteless things have limited applicability, etc.
But really, keeping things simple is in fact the correct answer.