Your Tactile Story Tray: Collaborative Tactile Images to Share with Blind and Visually Impaired People

Sharing a picture book can be a valuable social and educational activity for young children. However, blind and visually impaired people cannot fully participate because of their physical barrier. Tactile picture books are available, but are expensive and have limited options. To address this, this project investigates using 3D printed magnetized shapes with a metal tray as an alternative way to create a versatile and user-focused storytelling experience. The objective of this research is to develop a tactile system of representation of characters and their environment to empower blind and sighted family members to share in the creation of narrative. Our results show that this approach has the potential to help them share their stories and imagination through tactile images. The prototypes created form the basis for further investigation of new methods of making tactile picture books for the blind and visually-impaired

Pre-maps : An Educational Programme for Reading Tactile Maps

It is demanding for children with visual impairment to become aware of the world beyond their immediate experience. They need to learn to control spatial experiences as a whole and understand the relationships between objects, surfaces and themselves. Tactile maps can be an excellent source of information for depicting space and environment. By means of tactile maps children can develop their spatial understanding more efficiently than through direct travel experiences supplemented with verbal explanations. Tactile maps can help children when they are learning to understand environmental, spatial, and directional concepts. The ability to read tactile maps is not self-evident; it is a skill, which must be learned. The main research question was: can children who are visually impaired learn to read tactile maps at the preschool age if they receive structural teaching? The purpose of this study was to develop an educational program for preschool children with visual impairment, the aim of which was to teach them to read tactile maps in order to strengthen their orientation skills and to encourage them to explore the world beyond their immediate experience. The study is a multiple case study describing the development of the map program consisting of eight learning tasks. The program was developed with one preschooler who was blind, and subsequently the program was implemented with three other children. Two of the children were blind from birth, one child had lost her vision at the age of two, and one child had low vision. The program was implemented in a normal preschool. Another objective of the pre-map program was to teach the preschooler with visual impairment to understand the concept of a map. The teaching tools were simple, map-like representations called pre-maps. Before a child with visual impairment can read a comprehensive tactile map, it is important to learn to understand map symbols, and how a three-dimensional model changes to a two-dimensional tactile map. All teaching sessions were videotaped; the results are based on the analysis of the videotapes. Two of the children completed the program successfully, and learned to read a tactile map. The two other children felt happy during the sessions, but it was problematic for them to engage fully in the instruction. One of the two eventually completed the program, while the other developed predominantly emerging skills. The results of the children's performances and the positive feedback from the teachers, assistants and the parents proved that this pre-map program is appropriate teaching material for preschool children who are visually impaired. The program does not demand high-level expertise; also parents, preschool teachers, and school assistants can carry out the program.Alkeiskartat ohjaavat näkövammaista lasta lukemaan kohokarttoja Ympäristömme muuttuu yhä visuaalisemmaksi vaatien kykyä hahmottaa tilaa. Näkövammaisen lapsen ei ole helppoa saada käsitystä lähiympäristöstään ja oppia liikkumaan siellä omatoimisesti, kun hän näkemisen sijasta käyttää muita aisteja tilan hahmotukseen. Pelkästään liikkuminen tilassa ei anna välttämättä kokonaiskuvaa ympäristöstä ja sanallisten ohjeiden mukaan kulkeminen paikasta toiseen voi myös olla vaikeaa. Kartat ovat yksi väline ympäristön kuvaamiseen. Myös näkövammainen lapsi voi oppia käyttämään karttaa orientoitumisen apuna, jos kartta muunnetaan kohokartaksi, jota voi lukea sormin tunnustelemalla. Kohokartan lukeminen ei ole yksinkertaista vaan se on taito, jota pitää opetella. Tämän tutkimuksen pääkysymys oli, voiko esikouluikäinen näkövammainen lapsi oppia lukemaan kohokarttoja järjestelmällisen ohjauksen avulla? Tavoitteena oli kehittää opetusohjelma kohokartan lukemisen opetteluun ja harjoitella orientoitumisen taitoja sekä reittien opettelua. Työ kuvaa kahdeksan oppimistehtävää sisältävän opetusohjelman kehittämistä. Ohjelmaan liittyvät opetusvälineet ovat yksinkertaisia, kartanomaisia alkeiskarttoja (pre-maps). Niiden avulla näkövammainen lapsi oppii leikinomaisesti ymmärtämään, mitä kartta käsitteenä tarkoittaa ja miten kartta kuvaa ympäristöä ja osoittaa kohteiden sijainnin silloin kun lapsi ei ulotu koskettamaan niihin kädellään. Lisäksi hän oppii ymmärtämään, mitä symboli ja karttamerkki tarkoittavat ja miten kolmiulotteinen pienoismalli muuntuu kaksiulotteiseksi kohokartaksi. Kehittämisohjelma toteutettiin tavallisissa päiväkodeissa, neljä esikouluikäistä näkövammaista lasta osallistui ohjaukseen. Kaksi lapsista oli syntymästään sokeita, yksi lapsi oli menettänyt näkönsä kahden vuoden ikäisenä ja hänellä oli hieman näköä, mutta oudossa tilassa hän toimi käyttäen sokeain tekniikoita. Yksi lapsista oli heikkonäköinen. Kaikki opetustuokiot videoitiin, tulokset pohjautuvat videoiden analysointiin. Lasten edistyminen vaihteli. Kaksi lasta suoritti ohjelman menestyksellisesti. Kaksi muuta lasta olivat iloisia osallistujia, mutta heillä oli ongelmia ylläpitää jatkuvaa kiinnostusta ohjaustuokioiden ajan. Toinen heistä suoritti lopulta ohjelman, ja toinen lapsi saavutti lähinnä orastavat taidot. Lasten suoritusten tulokset sekä vanhempien ja opettajien antamat positiiviset lausunnot vahvistavat, että tämä kohokarttojen harjoitusohjelma soveltuu esikoulun opetusmateriaaliksi näkövammaiselle lapselle ja että kohokarttoja voi oppia lukemaan systemaattisen ohjauksen avulla. Myös lapsen vanhemmat, opettajat ja avustajat voivat käyttää ohjelmaa erilaisissa arjen tilanteissa

”Beyond 3D printers”: understanding long-term digital fabrication practices for the education of visually impaired or blind youth

Disability professionals could use digital fabrication tools to provide customised assistive technologies or accessible media beneficial to the education of Blind or visually impaired youth. However, there is little documentation of long-term practices with these tools by professionals in this field, limiting our ability to support their work. We report on such practices in a French organisation, providing disability educational services and using digital fabrication since 2013, for six years. We trace how professionals defined how digital fabrication could and should be used through a range of projects, based on pedagogical uses and the constraints in creation, production and maintenance. We outline new research perspectives going beyond 3D printers and its promises of automation to embrace hybrid approaches currently supported by laser cutters, the learning and documentation process, and the production of accessible tactile media at a regional or national scale

Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

Torino: A Tangible Programming Language Inclusive of Children with Visual Disabilities

© 2018, Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Across the world, policy initiatives are being developed to engage children with computer programming and computational thinking. Diversity and inclusion has been a strong force in this agenda, but children with disabilities have largely been omitted from the conversation. Currently, there are no age appropriate tools for teaching programming concepts and computational thinking to primary school children with visual disabilities. We address this gap through presenting the design and implementation of Torino, a tangible programming language for teaching programming concepts to children age 7–11 regardless of level of vision. In this paper, we: (1) describe the design process done in conjunction with children with visual disabilities; (2) articulate the design decisions made; and (3) report insights generated from an evaluation with 10 children with mixed visual abilities that considers how children are able to trace (read) and create (write) programs with Torino. We discuss key design trade-offs: (1) readability versus extensibility; and (2) size versus liveness. We conclude by reflecting upon how an inclusive design approach shaped the final result

The play behaviour of young blind children

There are very few studies on developmental patterns of play in blind children. Those studies which do exist suggest that their play is not only delayed but also different in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Study 1 of this thesis gathered descriptive, cross-sectional data on the spontaneously-emerging patterns of play behaviour in 16 'educationally blind' children aged 1 year 4 months to 6 years. Study 2 extended Study 1 by gathering further play data and taking measures of concurrent developmental status, thereby allowing differences in play profiles to be related to both chronological age and current stage in cognitive, language, social, gross motor and fine motor development. All eight categories of play commonly found in sighted children were observed in the group of blind children who participated in these two studies: collaborative, exploratory, imitative, repetitive, constructive, functional, receptive and pretend play. However, frequency and duration of engagement varied between children and across age groups, reflecting both differences in individual developmental profiles and the affordance ofthe proffered toys. Many of the play behaviours identified correlated significantly with scores on the developmental measures taken. Children with low scores on sensori-motor understanding, verbal comprehension and expressive language were more involved in exploratory play, and significantly less involved in collaborative, constructive and fantasy play. Although an association between gross and fine motor abilities and functional play behaviour might have been expected, no significant correlations were found with scores on either of the motor measures. In contrast, constructive play, rarely seen in the younger children, was significantly correlated with fine motor abilities, language and social skills.The first two studies observed the children playing mainly with toys which were typically available to them in their nursery/school, and it was noted that certain toys appeared to appeal more to the blind child and to engage them differentially. Study 3 was therefore designed i) to allow a comparative investigation of play patterns when 'standard' versus 'blind-friendly' toys were made available, and ii) to provide longitudinal comparative data over an 18 month period on the development of play in blind versus typically-developing young children. Four 'educationally' blind and 4 typically-developing sighted children, matched for general cognitive status and aged 3 to 6 years, played with toys, books and art materials which either had or lacked tactile, olfactory and musical features. Six categories of play were examined, creative, exploratory, constructive, functional, receptive and pretend play. In all 6 categories, there were differences in play behaviour for both blind and sighted children when play took place under 'standard' or 'blind-friendly' conditions. The blind children typically performed less well in the 'standard' condition, producing less varied play, engaging with significantly less materials, and spending a greater length of time off-task than the sighted children. However, in the 'blind -friendly' condition these differences were not evident.Taken together, these findings suggest that the reported delays in the development of play in blind children may, in part at least, be due to the type of toys used in research studies or to the methods in which materials are presented to the children. Given the important role play is believed to have in development, the findings have implications for both educational practice and theories of atypical development

Mapping Audio and Tactile Variables: A concatenated study to find inclusive correspondences for visual variables in geographic maps

The purpose of this research was to understand current geographic mapping paradigms, expose barriers faced by people who cannot rely on visual perception in the map reading experience, and propose a framework for designing maps to address these barriers. The study involved literature review, environmental scan, semi-structured interviews, surveys, and co-design with a variety of stakeholders. At each stage of the research auditory and tactile correlates for the visual variables used in geographic maps were documented and the results were synthesized into a framework referred to here as the VATmap (visual, audio, tactile) model. The framework can be used as a reference for designers and educators by suggesting strategies for communicating geographic information beyond visual display through a combination of visual, audio, and tactile map representations

Playful haptic environment for engaging visually impaired learners with geometric shapes

This thesis asserts that modern developments in technology have not been used as extensively as they could to aid blind people in their learning objectives. The same could also be said of many aspects of other areas of their lives. In particular in many countries blind students are discouraged from learning mathematics because of the intrinsically visual nature of many of the topics and particularly geometry. For many young people mathematics is also not a subject that is easily or willingly tackled. The research presented here has thus sort to answer whether a playful haptic environment could be developed which would be attractive to blind users to learn and interact with geometric concepts. In the study a software tool using a haptic interface was developed with certain playful characteristics. The environment developed sought to give the blind users practice in interacting with three dimensional geometric shapes and the investigation of the size of these shapes and their cross-section. The playful elements were enhanced by adding elements of competition such as scores and time limits which promote competition between the users. The tests have shown that blind users can easily use the system to learn about three dimensional shapes and that practice increases their confidence in recognising shape and size of these objects

Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2000)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Playful haptic environment for engaging visually impaired learners with geometric shapes

This thesis asserts that modern developments in technology have not been used as extensively as they could to aid blind people in their learning objectives. The same could also be said of many aspects of other areas of their lives. In particular in many countries blind students are discouraged from learning mathematics because of the intrinsically visual nature of many of the topics and particularly geometry. For many young people mathematics is also not a subject that is easily or willingly tackled. The research presented here has thus sort to answer whether a playful haptic environment could be developed which would be attractive to blind users to learn and interact with geometric concepts. In the study a software tool using a haptic interface was developed with certain playful characteristics. The environment developed sought to give the blind users practice in interacting with three dimensional geometric shapes and the investigation of the size of these shapes and their cross-section. The playful elements were enhanced by adding elements of competition such as scores and time limits which promote competition between the users. The tests have shown that blind users can easily use the system to learn about three dimensional shapes and that practice increases their confidence in recognising shape and size of these objects