COLUMBIA — Missouri doctoral student Emma Nicoson says fashion has been at the center of her life.
“When I was 9 years old, I asked for a sewing machine and I just started ripping things apart — and I drove my parents crazy,” Nicoson said.
Growing up in the small town of Brazil, Indiana, Nicoson found her passion and a best friend.
“It’s funny because I know her parents’ name, but I still call them Mr. and Ms. Nicoson, and I think I’ve done that since I’ve been 15,” Aaron See, a longtime friend of Nicoson’s, said. “She’s going to be part of my life and my soon-to-be son’s life until I kick the bucket.”
Their relationship only grew stronger after See was diagnosed with a rare eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa.
Doctors told See, who was a very active teenager playing baseball and football, that he would gradually lose his vision.
“When me and Emma first met in grade school, if you would have put a gun to my head and told me, ‘You’re going to go blind someday,’ I would have said you’re crazy,” See said. “Not me, not me.”
Years later, See asked Nicoson, then at Indiana State University, to help him shop for an interview outfit. The simple shopping trip changed their lives.
“Hey, you like this hoodie?” See had said to Nicoson. “I look good in orange.”
Nicoson said the color of the hoodie was yellow, and she said the experience showed her the difficulty of apparel shopping for people with blindness or low vision.
“When we went shopping, we realized that the fashion landscape and industry is very unkind to the blind and visually impaired,” Nicoson said.
That moment led Nicoson to dedicate her career and research to making fashion more accessible to people with low vision.
“When I started doing research, I asked Aaron if he would be willing to work with me, and every research endeavor we work together,” Nicoson said.
Nicoson’s and See’s most current work is trying to make apparel websites more accessible.
See said a majority of people with blindness or low vision prefer to shop online because of the difficulty of shopping in person.
To shop in person, See said he has to purchase transportation to the store, and then he needs a sighted guide to help him navigate the store.
“I don’t even know where to start looking for a shirt,” See said. “I could be in the baseball section looking for shorts.”
But shopping online still has plenty of challenges for See and other people with low vision or blindness.
See said that even if a website is accessible, that does not mean it is usable for people who can’t see it.
Pop-ups and poor text-to-voice coding can make navigation and visualization of websites difficult.
Colors can also be poorly described or over-described in images, causing confusion for users.
“Throwing out ‘granite gray’ is descriptive, but if you’ve never seen a rock or what granite is, is that really helpful?” See said.
Nicoson said that terms like “sky blue” and “black rinse” can even be confusing for people who don’t have sight loss. People she has interviewed while shopping have even said they don’t understand what terms like those mean.
“Anytime I interview people shopping, they’re like, ‘What does that even mean?'” Nicoson said. “And I say, ‘I don’t know.'”
That’s why Nicoson is looking to develop a more inclusive dictionary of words to describe apparel.
She was recently awarded a fellowship in Norway to work with 12 blind computer scientists to code websites to be more accessible for people with low vision or blindness.
“We have a lot to do to try to code the back ends of websites properly,” Nicoson said.
She said she hopes to create a base formula for websites that can be adopted into federal legislation — making websites accessible across the board.
“My only goal is to make one person’s life better,” Nicoson said. “If I can help one person feel better, I’ve done what I’ve intended to do.”
Nicoson will leave for Norway in September.
