Lucy Edwards is rooting around in her makeup bag for her mascara; it is the indentations on the product’s lid that help her to locate it. The mascara is what she describes as ‘accidentally accessible’ in that its texture allows her to distinguish it from other products.

Edwards, who lost her sight when she was 17, was the first British blind person to pave the way for change on YouTube. Her video ‘blind girl does her own makeup’ gained over 700,000 views on the platform. Her channel not only delivers stand out make-up advice; but brings humanity and empathy to the business imperative of accessible and inclusive design. 

Speaking at the Creative Equals RISE event today, Edwards was passionate about the importance of making products accessible by design and the power of each and every person across the industry to make a difference when it comes to creating a world which is accessible by design. As she explained: “You can make a change; it's about everyone banding together to make change in this world. We can do it."

Embracing universal design

Edwards shared the importance of Universal design in making the world accessible. Pointing to the example of Apple, she urged companies to incorporate universal design into their business model from day one. “Universal design can be incorporated into anything if it is thought about first,” she explained.

Sharing her love of the beauty industry, Edwards’ sister spent hours describing make-up tutorials to her. Yet when she ventures into a Boots or a Superdrug all the bottles feel the same. Without Braille labels or audio labels, Edwards is excluded from the very thing she loves the most.

Showing how she has adapted her own products, she shared her own beauty pallets; amplified with audio labels and Braille labeling. 

Representation matters

In a powerful and deeply personal talk, Edwards shared that she simply did not know where she would be without her drive to want to see herself portrayed in the media. She explained: “I know that little Lucys out there do not have the independence they should have. I want them to see the ability in disability and I am not going to stop until I feel like the world has changed.”

To this end Edwards spoke eloquently about the role for innovation and the impact of groundbreaking apps such as ‘Be My Eyes’ which describes products to blind and partially sighted people.

She urged the audience to consider the isolation many people felt in lockdown within the context of the disability and exclusion which disabled people experience every single day. And to use the inflection point of lockdown to consider the fact that a lot of disabled people are isolated all of the time. 

Edwards notes that a lot of the terminology surrounding being blind in the media is ‘awful’. Sharing her own experiences of discrimination, she described how she harnessed her own self-belief to “throw positivity at things.”

Following her calling to be a storyteller, as a trained BBC journalist she is now successfully changing the narrative for others. Reasonable adjustments from her employer led to unreasonable success on her own terms.