Innovation and Accessibility Advances Beyond Vision’s Employment Mission – Privacy Shield®

We look at limitations differently at Beyond Vision. We take processes one would normally think would be impossible for someone with a visual impairment to accomplish, and make it possible. Innovation and accessibility is a primary focus of nearly everything we do at Beyond Vision, and it makes our mission of providing meaningful employment to people who are blind possible. A shining example of this is in our Privacy Shield® production line, which we began providing to our federal government customers back in 2007.

The Privacy Shield is a thin coating that when placed over your computer screen, tablet, or smartphone, prevents casual onlookers from viewing personal information on your screen. The Privacy Shield helps protect your private on-screen information by allowing only the person directly in front of the device to see information. Beyond Vision manufactures more than 20,000 Privacy Shields a year in a wide variety of sizes. Our engineering staff has recently designed a framed version of the Privacy Shield product, providing both a higher degree of privacy as well as the added benefit of making it easier for end users to quickly remove and reinstall it when they want to share data with others. A patent on the product is pending and will be the first ever patent held by Beyond Vision.

In the past few years, our production process has been streamlined to make it accessible and safe to our visually impaired employees. There are audible cues in the privacy filter room to inform the user when the machinery is running and when it is complete. We have also adapted fixtures for the assembly and packaging area of the product to allow for an employee to complete the task without sight.

The Privacy Shield product line has been an overwhelming success. Each time you purchase one of our products, you are supporting the employment of people who are blind like Sophia Kipp. Although Sophia lost her sight to a blinding retinal disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa, she has quickly proven herself to be a valuable employee. By focusing on her abilities rather than her disability, Sophia has become the product champion of our Privacy Filter product line and continues to break production rates. The goal for the product line is to reach into the commercial marketplace in order to further increase sales and employment opportunities.