Beyond Touch: An Exploratory Survey of Non-visual Cues and Colour Accessibility in Clothing Retail Among Ten Visually Impaired Students in Kumasi, Ghana

Inclusive fashion writing often proposes touch as a route to colour for blind and partially sighted people. This exploratory survey asks which non-visual cues ten visually impaired students at Wesley College of Education, Kumasi, Ghana, use when choosing clothes, and which colour-accessibility provisions they say they would value. Participants completed an accessible questionnaire with Likert and open-ended items; results are reported as counts and describe this group only. Asked how they usually choose clothes (more than one answer allowed), five named help from another person, three touch and three verbal description. Participants were split evenly on whether fabric texture informs their sense of colour (four agreed, four disagreed, two neutral). Six judged that fashion brands do not provide adequate accessibility features. All ten agreed that retail staff trained to describe colour would improve their shopping, and all ten said they would be more loyal to brands offering colour accessibility, an intention not tested against purchasing. Open-ended answers named missing, wrong and vague descriptions, shades that cannot be told apart and mismatched outfits. Read through the social model of disability, these are problems in how garments and shops carry colour information. On textile grounds, touch can convey colour only where a code has been added. We offer a layered approach, matching provisions to moments of need, as a proposal for design research and not as a finding; the survey did not ask about online shopping or QR-linked labels, and rated Braille and audio provisions together in a single item.