Enhancing the lives of people with low vision or blindness through co-design

Guide Dogs Victoria (GDV) is a not-for-profit organisation with approximately 165 employees and 510 volunteers, delivering over 1.3 million volunteer hours each year. Providing diverse services for people who are blind or have low vision, GDV offers guide dogs, children and adult mobility services, occupational therapy, assistive technology, support coordination and acquired brain injury mobility services.

GDV has been delivering services to people who are blind or have low vision for over 60 years. Traditionally, the organisation is well known for its guide dogs, however this accounts for just 30% of services offered. GDV works with a broad range of people from newborn babies through to people in their nineties, providing services and support that help people with blindness or low vision to live independently and safely in the community.

Challenge

The organisation has a goal to be the first choice for clients in everything it offers and has recently undertaken a period of significant change to ensure a sustainable future business model. As part of that, this project was driven by GDV’s desire to remove barriers for people with low vision and blindness and their carers when accessing information and connecting to services, peers and communities - and to ensure their experience matches that of a sighted person.

GDV was awarded a grant from the NDIA to collaborate with a technology partner to co-design an information and peer linkages platform for the Australian blind and low-vision community.

Solution

DXC Technology was engaged to build a peer-to-peer support platform that could provide GDV’s clients with access to reliable, accurate and up-to-date information that would be relevant to them. Utilising DXC’s Digital Transformation Centre (DTC), located at Swinburne University of Technology (SUT), enabled a highly participatory approach of co-designing the platform with individuals with low vision or blindness who actively contributed to the success of the project.

DXC committed to the project without knowing exactly what the technology requirements were. DXC involved both GDV staff and clients during the entire journey, from user research and design, through to building and testing the platform. The project team, which included several consultants with ‘lived experience’ of blindness or low vision, spent a great deal of time with GDV staff guiding them through a human-centred design process. SUT was involved early on to consider how the team could research and understand the platform’s potential impact, as well as during the actual platform design process.

Results

GDV puts its clients at the centre of everything it does and acknowledges that digital transformation can be life changing and extremely empowering for clients. The platform created with DXC offers an information base within the GDV community, and beyond, for people to understand the services available to them, what’s going on in the community, training opportunities and so on. It allows GDV to regularly introduce new information to the community and keep people updated.

Benefits already delivered for GDV clients include:

• Being more connected with their community and having easy access to the information they need to make decisions and choices;
• Having greater access to social and peer networks;
• Being able to develop the necessary skills and confidence to participate and contribute to the community and protect their rights;
• Being able to use and benefit from the same mainstream services as everyone else;
• Participating in and benefiting from community activities; and
• Making active contributions to leading, shaping and influencing their community.

The success of this project with DXC is being applied across new projects, and GDV has been able to branch out with other digital transformation initiatives and technological innovations.