It's just a couple of simple strips of plastic.
But an invention from entrepreneur Craig A. Richardson promises to change the lives of the blind and vision-impaired, and to improve the productivity of just about everybody else who deals with a rack of CDs or DVDs for their job.
Richardson's patent-pending invention is called the Easy See Case. He takes a normal jewel case, the type CDs and some DVDs come in, and replaces part of the brittle styrene plastic at the hinge with softer PVC plastic. This piece of plastic pops out of the CD case at an angle, allowing for a much larger end label than current CDs allow.
The bottom line: the Easy See label allows print up to 36-point to be used on CD labels -- readable by legally blnd people, and readable by normally sighed people across the room. And the label, at about three quarters of an inch in height, is big enough to hold Braille labels for the blind -- so they won't have to pull out the CD from the rack to use Braille labels on the top of the CD case.
Richardson was born in Detroit and grew up in Oak Park, Royal Oak and Harrison. A lifelong inventor, he sent his first idea to an uncle who was one of the founders of the office furniture firm Steelcase. (The uncle advsised Richardson to avoid get-rich-quick schemes and get a secure job with a big company.)
Richardson later attended Oakland Community College and then served with the Army in Viet Nam, where he lost part of his hearing, making him a service disabled veteran. He then finished college at Oakland University and then worked in the insurance and trucking industries in the Detroit area and Cadillac.
"I've always had ideas for inventions," Richardson said. "One night I lost my glasses and was looking for a particular CD, and I couldn't locate it the way I had CDs in my rack by the spine label. I thought there had to be a better way to identify content."
Over the course of a few months five years ago, Richardson came up with the concept of Easy See.
Since then, Richardson has visited everywhere from OfficeMax to Staples to Sony to Warner Brothers to Universal to military installations.
Everyone says his popout labels would save people scads of time they now spend looking at tiny type of a particular title on a CD.
Patrick D. Cannon, State Director, Michigan Commission for the Blind, is Richardson's first customer, buying 500 cases. Cannon said he's urged Richardson to vigorously market the product, believing it would be of interest to a great many visually impaired consumers.
Richardson said he's close to production of CD cases with the Easy See feature. And even though sales of prerecorded CDs are falling, the market for empty cases -- for stuff people have downloaded and want to back up onto physical media -- is going up. He said he's doing everything he can to make sure production of the cases happens in Michigan, but also complained of a lack of startup capital.
Richardson said Easy See will also help companies comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. It's also been nominated for a da Vinci Award for Accessibility and Universal Design, a program of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Visit Richardson's Troy-based E Z C Enterprises LLC on the Web at www.easyseecase.com. The product will also be featured on WTVS Channel 56 on its program Disabilities Today on Tuesday, July 14 at 5:30 p.m.
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