Guide Dogs offers much more than just dogs.
Video description.
Video opens on the Guide Dogs logo on a black background. We zoom in through the letter ‘O’ to reveal graphic representation of an eye with a pulsating iris. The words ‘More than just guide dogs’ appear on the screen in big, bold, steady text to enable people with blurred vision to view the phrase.
The text spins and transitions into the centre of the screen, to assist viewing for people with tunnel vision. In the next scene, the phrase duplicates and moves to the very top and bottom edges of the screen, so that it can be read by a person with peripheral vision.
Now, the background changes from dark to light to show different types of contrast. Once again the text duplicates so that there are now four instances of the phrase in different areas on the screen, making it consumable for people with fragmented vision. The video transitions into a split screen to make it accessible for those with field blindness, with the words repeated on both sides of the central line.
The screen goes dark to represent total blindness, before transitioning back to the pulsating iris graphic. The Guide Dogs logo appears.
Guide Dogs was proud to partner with Thinkerbell on the development of our “more than just Guide Dogs” campaign which was created to dispel misconceptions that we only provide Guide Dog services, when in fact, non-dog-related services make up over 70 percent of our service offering!
Ultimately, by utilising our “more than just Guide Dogs” message in a way that is accessible and tailored specifically to people with low vision or blindness, our goal is to encourage people who are experiencing a change in vision to reach out and seek support from our wide range of services much sooner than we know they already do.
In order to tailor our approach specifically to our audience, we first wanted to ensure there was a solid scientific foundation in place.
So, everything we developed was done so in collaboration with a range of specialists including our own Guide Dogs practitioners, Clients with various levels of low vision or blindness, and of course Thinkerbell and their production team.
The objective was to gain insight and understanding into how best to animate our on screen “more than just Guide Dogs” message, and to ensure that changes in size, position and colour would represent and accommodate some of the most common vision conditions our practitioners support. These include blurred vision, tunnel vision, peripheral vision, patchy blindness, field blindness, colour blindness and lastly total blindness.
As well as carefully considered graphic elements, the music and sound design were constructed especially for this project. We wanted to enhance inclusivity and add another layer of depth by creating a sense of each eye condition with an audio effect. Even our voiceover and audio description was provided by long-term Guide Dogs Client, Alistair Lee; a professional voiceover artist who is also blind.
