Contribution to TRIS Notification 2025/0311/ES — resubmitted as 2026/0295/ES
To: European Commission — Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (GROW), Single Market Enforcement / TRIS contact point (grow-dir2015-1535-central@ec.europa.eu), with copy to the notifying authority, Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030 (Kingdom of Spain).
From: NaviLens — a Spanish public-private innovation co-developed since 2012 with the University of Alicante.
Subject: Request to place real autonomy, not assisted dependency, at the centre of accessible labelling, and to recognise proven accessible digital technologies as a valid and sufficient means of compliance.
1. About NaviLens and the purpose of this submission
NaviLens is a Spanish company specialising in accessible digital labelling and wayfinding solutions. Its core technology, the NaviLens system, has been co-developed since 2012 with the University of Alicante.
Over more than a decade of research and real-world deployment, the NaviLens system has developed into an advanced, audible coded-marker system that lets blind or low-vision users detect, locate and read information from a distance and from wide angles, without having to find the code first, focus a camera, or locate a tactile marker. The app is free of charge on iOS and Android and is used every day by blind and low-vision people around the world.
The NaviLens system is in everyday use with global consumer-goods companies — among them Procter & Gamble, Kellogg's, Nestlé and many others — and in public-transport systems in dozens of cities across Europe and beyond, with over 85 implementations worldwide.
In Spain, it has been deployed in the pharmaceutical sector by Cinfa, with the approval of the Spanish Medicines Agency (AEMPS), giving blind patients independent voice access to a medicine's name, presentation, expiry date, batch number and the full package leaflet. This is offered not as promotion, but as direct, audited evidence that the exact safety-critical information this Draft Royal Decree seeks to protect can already be delivered reliably, autonomously and at scale.
This submission is made in full support of the social objective of the Spanish initiative. People who are blind or have low vision must be able to access consumer-product information on equal terms, safely and without discrimination, as required by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), to which both the European Union and all its Member States are parties.
The concern raised here is not with the goal, but with a design choice in the current draft which, in NaviLens's considered view, risks limiting the autonomy that the Convention seeks to protect.
2. Spain's progress and the risk of an unintended step backwards in autonomy
NaviLens recognises that the notifying authority has listened. The 2025 version of this measure placed mandatory Braille and a tactile-marked QR code on the product itself, and drew detailed opinions from the Commission and from several Member States on internal-market and proportionality grounds.
The new draft removes those product-level obligations and shifts compliance to large retail establishments. From an internal-market perspective this is a genuine improvement: the goods that circulate freely across the Union are no longer altered for the Spanish market alone.
But the proportionality concern has not been solved — it has been relocated. In resolving the trade-barrier problem, the draft has made the accessibility model markedly less autonomous. Article 2(2) now defines accessible labelling solely as the Braille system. The genuinely autonomous, technology-based formats that the draft's own recitals praise have been demoted to Article 4(2) as a voluntary measure that operators “may” adopt. The mandatory core (Article 3) is now an on-request, in-store, human-mediated service: a clerk prints a Braille label at the moment of purchase, or a staff member personally assists the shopper.
This is the central concern of the present submission. A model built on asking for help, waiting for something to be printed, and depending on a third party is not universal accessibility in the sense the CRPD requires. It is assisted dependency, and it sits in direct tension with the draft's own legal foundations.
3. Accessibility must mean independence, not dependency
The draft's preamble invokes Article 9 CRPD (accessibility) and Article 6 of Spain's consolidated disability law, which guarantees persons with disabilities the right to free decision-making, with information provided “following rules based on the principle of universal design”.
The whole point of universal design is that a person can act without needing a bespoke accommodation requested case by case. A service that activates only when the blind shopper identifies themselves, asks an employee, and waits is the opposite of universal design — it is special-case assistance.
Real accessibility begins before checkout: when a person can orient themselves in the shop, locate the product on the shelf, identify it, and consult its essential information by themselves.
The current draft does not enable any of that. It assumes the blind consumer has already, somehow, found and chosen the product, and then offers a printed Braille label and a helping hand at the till. The most important part of the shopping experience — independent discovery and choice — is left entirely unaddressed.
Dignity point: Requiring a person to disclose their disability and request assistance in order to obtain information that sighted customers read for free, instantly and privately, is not equal treatment. Equal treatment is the blind customer reading the shelf themselves, in the same aisle, at the same moment, with the same privacy.
4. A Braille-centred model excludes most of the people it intends to help
Key figure: By centring the mandatory mechanism on Braille, the measure leaves out more than 90% of people who are blind or have low vision, who do not read Braille. Braille remains valuable and must be supported — but it cannot be the principal, defining channel of a measure meant to deliver universal accessibility. A truly inclusive rule must reach the whole diversity of profiles within this group, including people with low vision, late-onset sight loss, and additional cognitive or motor needs, the great majority of whom rely on audio and on the screen-reader already built into their phone.
This is precisely where accessible digital technology is not a luxury but a necessity. An audible coded marker can be read aloud by the standard screen reader on an ordinary smartphone, serving Braille readers and non-Braille readers alike with the same single solution — the defining test of universal design.
5. The on-request model introduces avoidable risk on safety-critical data
Article 3 requires staff to transcribe, at the point of sale, information such as “use by” / “best before” dates and allergen indications into a freshly printed Braille label. Manual transcription of safety-critical data, performed live in a busy retail environment, introduces a foreseeable risk of error, omission, transcription mistakes and out-of-date information.
In a domain expressly tied to health and safety, sound regulatory design should minimise that risk, not build it into the normal operation of the system.
Proven alternative, already operational in Spain. With Cinfa and the Spanish Medicines Agency, accessible digital codes on medicines already give blind patients voice access to the product name, presentation, expiry date, batch number and the full leaflet — sourced directly from the manufacturer's own data, not retyped by hand. The same approach delivers exactly the safety-critical information this decree seeks to protect, accurately and autonomously.
6. A proportionate compliance path for accessible product labelling
It is worth noting that the draft shifts the entire compliance burden onto retailers and other commercial operators — including, through the universal in-store-assistance obligation, smaller establishments such as pharmacies, beauty and personal-care outlets.
Requiring every qualifying store to stand up an on-demand Braille-printing service plus trained personal assistance is operationally heavy, costly to maintain, and difficult to deliver consistently — and, as section 4 shows, it still does not reach most blind and low-vision customers.
Recognising accessible digital solutions as a valid means of compliance offers those operators a lighter, more scalable and more durable route: a single accessible code, placed on the shelf-edge price label or on the product, that the customer reads independently with their own phone.
It serves more people, removes the live-transcription risk, and reduces the standing operational cost — a better outcome for consumers and for the businesses alike. This is the kind of less-restrictive, proportionate alternative that the 2025 detailed opinions repeatedly asked Spain to assess.
7. The solution: autonomous in-store guidance and self-service information
Accessible coded markers can be detected without the user knowing exactly where they are placed, without focusing the camera, and read aloud from a distance and from wide angles — characteristics that make them especially suited to a retail environment.
Placed on the shelf-edge price label, they let a blind or low-vision person orient themselves in the store, find the item, and access its essential information directly, before reaching the till, with no need to request personal assistance.
In short, technology capable of delivering the autonomy the CRPD requires already exists, including European solutions that are free for the user and in daily use. The regulation should integrate it expressly, rather than relegate it to a voluntary footnote.
8. Requested amendments
NaviLens respectfully requests that the European Commission encourage the Kingdom of Spain to ensure that the final text:
- Recognises accessible digital technologies as a valid and sufficient means of compliance — placed in Article 2 alongside Braille, not relegated to the voluntary promotion clause in Article 4(2) — wherever they guarantee universal accessibility, require no personal-data processing, and faithfully reproduce the product information. These solutions work through the consumer's own smartphone and a freely available app, so they impose no new charge on the shopper and no recurring service cost on the establishment.
- Reframes personal in-store assistance as a complementary support, not as the principal axis of the system, so that independent self-service access is the default and assistance is the fallback.
- Allows accessibility to live on the product or on the shelf-edge price label, so that a person can orient, identify, choose and access information autonomously before checkout.
- Ensures that safety-critical data — expiry / best-before dates, allergens — are not made dependent on live manual transcription at the point of sale.
9. Suggested drafting language
To give effect to the above, a single neutral provision in Article 2 would suffice. NaviLens offers the following for consideration:
“Accessible labelling shall also include the incorporation — on the product itself, on the shelf, or on the shelf-edge price label — of accessible technological systems (such as audible coded-marker systems or equivalent solutions) that enable a consumer who is blind or has low vision to access the product's essential information autonomously, unambiguously and in an up-to-date form through their own mobile device, without the need for personal assistance or manual handling of data, provided that such systems guarantee universal accessibility, do not require the consumer to identify themselves or undergo any processing of personal data, and faithfully reflect the information provided through other labelling.”
This wording is deliberately technology-neutral and provider-agnostic: it names no company as a mandatory standard, it imposes nothing on products that circulate across the Union, and it is fully compatible with the forthcoming EU framework on digital labelling (including the CLP digital-labelling provisions applicable from July 2026 and the harmonised packaging-label implementing act under Regulation (EU) 2025/40).
It strengthens the measure on the very ground — proportionality and autonomy — on which it is most exposed.
10. Conclusion
Accessibility must not translate into dependency. The best regulation is not the one that obliges a person to ask for help; it is the one that makes it possible for a person who is blind or has low vision to orient themselves, choose, access all the information, and buy by themselves — safely and on equal terms.
Where technology capable of making that possible already exists — including European solutions that are free for the user and proven in the field — a measure that aspires to universal accessibility should embrace it expressly. Doing so would protect the consumer better, reduce error, lighten the load on the businesses now asked to deliver the service, and fulfil far more completely the objective of autonomy and independence that the Convention — and the draft's own preamble — proclaim.
NaviLens would be glad to provide technical documentation, independent user testimonials and field evidence of the system's effectiveness at the Commission's or the notifying authority's convenience.
Respectfully submitted,
NaviLens
On behalf of the organisation www.navilens.com
