I never wear my reading glasses in the shower, no one does, but if you are staying in a motel and are using those tiny bottles of shampoo you need your reading glasses. I edited the photo to represent the different ways I see these bottles. The top is the way they look with my reading glasses, the bottom is the way they look without them. There is the problem.
In the shower, I’m trying to get the shampoo, then the conditioner. It is always in that order, but there is another variable, the body lotion. You never want to put the body lotion in your hair, but it looks exactly like the shampoo and the conditioner when I don’t have my reading glasses. When I think ahead, I get my glasses I study the bottle and then I strategically place them in the shower, shampoo on the right, conditioner on the left, and the lotion way over by the sink.
I have a solution. It will only cost about an hour of work by a label design specialist. Place a large S, C or L on the bottle. Here are those three letters in different points (the way we measure typeface sizes). S (This is 8pt). C (This is 10pt). L (this is 16pt). I recommend that those little bottles be required to have an s, c or L in at least 16pt so that people with marginal vision are able to distinguish between them when not wearing their reading glasses.
The people designing these labels are doing it on huge computer monitors with HD resolution and color corrected screens. They fly through the process on some desktop publishing program. They balance the text, they add logos, they debate the colors. Then the label goes through an approval process. People see them printed on high quality paper in well-lit rooms while wearing their reading glasses. Someone approves the design and then they go into production. Tens of thousands of labels are printed, placed on bottles and distributed. Then, they are put into dimly lit, tiny rooms filled with steam and people are asked to discern between three bottles. That is why people all over the world have put lotion into their hair or washed conditioner out with shampoo.
This is a minor inconvenience. It is childish to even complain about it, but it is instructive to me. There are problems that people have of which I have no awareness. If I see without reading glasses, then I don’t have any idea what people who wear reading glasses see when they look at those tiny bottles.
How often do you see someone in a behavior that you don’t understand? Is it because you see the world differently? Is it because your experience is different than theirs? This is the only explanation for tiny fonts on these bottles. The people designing them are out of touch. This is why we see people angry about abuse or neglect and because it is not our experience we assume they are the problem – not the abuse. Every so often we have to try to see through another person’s eyes.