If the thought of wrapping Christmas presents with a sight condition is adding to your festive stress, we’re here to help. Claire, a mum of two primary-school age boys, who has been blind since the age of four, shares tips based on her own experience and “a few disasters”.
1. Be organised.
Claire says, "Before you do anything else make sure you’ve got the right gift to hand. Use Seeing AI, or Be My Eyes, or a human if you’ve got one at hand, to identify the presents, and then sort them into piles for each person. You can then wrap each person’s presents in one go.”
If you use smart glasses you can use either the object identification feature for this, or video call someone to help you remotely.
Browse Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses
2. Have the right tools to hand
Useful tools to make wrapping easier include a tape dispenser, a thimble for cutting paper (for example, the Nimble which is worn on your finger, letting you slice through wrapping paper more easily than with scissors), gift bags for bottles and awkward shaped gifts, brown paper tape (if you’re wrapping with brown paper) – it’s much easier to feel the end of the tape on the roll than with plastic sticky tape, and a handheld braille labeller for quickly labelling presents with the recipient’s name.
Buy Braille labeller (Reizen RL-350) from £39.00
3. Calculate paper sizes quickly
To calculate how much paper you need for each gift, you can use this simple formula to be sure the length and width of your paper is enough...
You will need the length, width and height of the item to be wrapped. The length of paper will need to be two times item length plus two times item height, plus a little extra for overlap. The width of the paper will be the item width plus the item height, plus a little extra for the overlap. You may find our tactile ruler or the IKONN tape measure helpful at this stage.
Buy IKONN tape measure from £69.00
4. Make cutting and wrapping easier
Claire’s solution to the challenge of cutting wrapping paper (especially paper on a roll), is to lay the paper on a flat surface, ideally a table without a bevelled edge, and use the edge of the table as a guide to cut the paper straight. For really neat edges, you can fold in the cut edge before you tape it down, too.
“Place the gift right in the middle of the paper and use a tiny bit of tape to stop it moving around. Then fold in the paper, checking before taping.”
5. Use accessible labels
Our Christmas sticker gift tags are specifically designed for blind and partially sighted people. Each pack contains six sheets of six brightly coloured braille stickers. With six festive designs in the pack, you can assign one design per person to make it easy to know who a present is for.
Each 5cm diameter sticker features a colourful, tactile Christmas graphic (a star, a Christmas gift, a bauble, for example) with a seasonal word in large print and uncontracted braille. Both the braille and print are white to stand out against the coloured background.
If you need more stickers, the Christmas sticker selection pack has 16 more brightly coloured, tactile stickers (two each of eight designs). Or use our handheld braille labeller with clear tape, for discreet braille name labels on every gift.
You can also use stick-on bows to distinguish between gifts – the number, size, colour and placement of the bows can be a way to ID gifts. You could also use different textures of ribbon and twine to make presents easier to identify.
Craft shops sell a wide selection of tactile festive ‘toppers’ that can also be used to make gifts distinctive – or you could add different shapes and sizes of button to gifts to make them easy to distinguish.
If you’re wrapping for your own children, then brailling a label to add to their Santa sack and/or stocking can be helpful (using the sack or stocking to keep presents together can also be helpful).
For non-braillists, consider audio labels. You can record labels with the recipient's name using the RNIB PENfriend or Hable speechlabels. PENfriend labels are read by the PENfriend device, while Hable speechlabels are read by a smartphone (choose QR code labels and scan with the phone's camera, or NFC labels that are activated by the phone coming close to them). Both types of label can be stuck to a sturdy cardboard label and used again, year after year.
