Workplace safety is an important piece to the Beyond Vision mission. We pride ourselves on creating a work environment where all of our employees are safe. In fact, it has been more than 10 years since Beyond Vision has had a loss time accident of any kind. Our safety team holds regular meetings to discuss different ways we can improve the safety and mobility of our employees, both sighted and visually impaired.

This year, thanks to generous donations from The Dr. Harry J. Heeb Foundation and Beyond Vision board member Eric Schumann, we were able to make major safety and mobility improvement on our shop floor. This project was designed to give blind employees the ability to clearly identify safe walk paths throughout the shop. We created textured pathways, offset by tactile line stripes to give our blind employees’ feet, canes and/or service dogs a clear difference between a workstation area and a pathway.

Many of our employees who are severely visually impaired or blind have already commented on how much safer and more efficient it is for them to navigate to and from workstations and break rooms.

George Washington, an employee in our Assembly & Packaging department talks about how he uses the new tactile aisles to navigate through the shop using his cane.

“We needed something like this a long time ago. I use the stripes to get to my Pentair and Briggs workstations by myself. Once I locate the stripe I can tell if I am inside the path because the floor is smoother.”