Cooking with Sight Loss: Organising Your Cupboards

Cooking is challenging when you have little or no vision, but it can be done! It starts with how you organise your cupboards! Mark lets you in to some of his top tips in this Video.

Summary:

In this episode of “Henshaws Life Hacks,” the focus is on supporting individuals with sight loss and other disabilities to improve their kitchen organisation. The narrator discusses various techniques for organising cupboards to make it easier for people with low vision or no vision to find and access their food.

The suggested method involves categorising items by shelf. For instance, placing meats on the top shelf, vegetables on the middle shelf, and pet food on the bottom shelf, ensuring there’s no confusion between them. To further facilitate identification, Mark uses elastic bands to distinguish between different types of canned goods. Each category of food is assigned a specific number of elastic bands: beans have one, spaghetti has two, soup has three, and chopped tomatoes have four. This tactile system allows visually impaired individuals to identify the contents of each tin quickly.

Mark also introduces a technological solution called OrCam, which is a camera connected to a device with advanced recognition capabilities. By pointing the camera at an item, it can verbally announce what the product is. In the demonstration, the narrator successfully uses OrCam to identify a packet of noodles and even receives cooking instructions.