3D Printed Tactile Picture Books for Children with Visual Impairments: A Design Probe

Abigale Stangl ATLAS

University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309 USA

abigale.stangl@colorado.edu

Jeeeun Kim Computer Science

University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309 USA

jeeeun.kim@colorado.edu

Tom Yeh Computer Science

University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309 USA

tom.yeh@colorado.edu

ABSTRACT Young children with visual impairments greatly benefit from tactile graphics (illustrations, images, puzzles, objects) during their learning processes. In this paper we present insight about using a 3D printed tactile picture book as a design probe. This has allowed us to identify and engage stakeholders in our research on improving the technical and human processes required for creating 3D printed tactile pictures, and cultivate a community of practice around these processes. We also contribute insight about how our in-person and digital methods of interacting with teachers, parents, and other professionals dedicated to supporting children with visual impairments contributes to research practices.

Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.3 [ Design]: General Terms Documentation, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Keywords Tactile Graphics, Tactile Picture books, Design Probe, Blind, Children, Communities of Practice

1. INTRODUCTION For children who are born with or who acquire visual impairments (VI), reading requires an additional layer of three-dimensional tactile information so that the child can feel the shapes of the objects. Tactile pictures make the content of a book relatable and legible. The creation of tactile pictures requires visual pictures or experiences to be transcribed such that a child natively relates to the content, or associate the represented object with the real world. Conversely, tactile picture books aid in the development of a child’s tactile acuity and mobility, their sense of seeing or feeling of their environment, as well as their confidence to explore and build relationships and associations through touch.

In this paper we present our initial steps towards creating a digital library of 3D printed tactile picture books, as an effort to make tactile graphics more accessible to parents, teachers, advocacy organizations, and designers committed supporting children with VI, as well as making tactile graphic creation practices more accessible. We discuss how the use of social media and online communication facilitated a 3D printed picture book to become a

design probe to solicit feedback from a user-population that is typically difficult to access due to their limitation of time and proximity. [2]. Additionally, we share insight gained about the need space from these respondents and how this information informs future design work towards the goal of creating a 3D tactile picture book library. We build on previous research about how 3D printing and other automated methods of creating tactile graphics and measuring feedback may provide benefit to a variety of stakeholders; these benefits including the creation of affordable, replicable, and personalized tactile picture books.

2. FOUNDATIONAL RESERCH Our research began with the suspicion that 3D printing will become beneficial to the community committed supporting children with VI. To investigate this suspicion, we formed a partnership with a preschool for young children with VI to identify the unique needs of the children and their families, the role teachers of the visually impaired (TVIs) can play in a child and her family’s life, and the environments and materials that support their learning, as well as how and why tactile graphics are typically made for children with VI. We volunteered in classrooms, assisted with a summer camp, and interviewed TVIs and parents about their general practices of making tactile books. During this formative research we noted that parents feel like there is a limited selection of tactile picture books, either due to availability at their child’s school or library, that they are expensive, or because of their child’s unique needs [11]. Of the parents that have created tactile books, making their own books was not a common practice due to the time and effort it took to make the books. While there are resources and guidelines [6] [9] available to parents and teachers interested in creating tactile graphics, there are few forums for teachers, parents, and artists to share how they apply these guidelines to their craft or the actual materials they created. These factors present immediate barrier of entry for many parents with children with VI wanting to access or create tactile graphics. Parents often depend on their child’s TVI to learn about learning resources for their child, national organizations like the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), and occasionally social media sites like Pinterest for inspiration.

We also attended the Tactile Graphics Conference put on by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB). This quinquennial conference attracts around 200 artists, TVIs and transcriptionists from all over the world to gather and share their knowledge. At this event, we observed that the practitioners, governmental representatives, and companies that attend were more oriented at sharing resources and knowledge about resources than emerging methods of production. We also learned that there are few formalized studies on their creation methods or field tests.

Parents and TVI’s do share information about resources on list serves like the NFB-Members list, Blindkid list, BVI-Parents list,

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org.

IDC'14, June 17–20, 2014, Aarhus, Denmark. Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-2272-0/14/06…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2593968.2610482

321

etc., however much of the content pertains to parents exchanging advice about how to handle difficult scenarios or access resources, as opposed to providing information about their practices creating tactile picture graphics. An analysis of posts on the list serves mentioned above showed that the phrase “Tactile Graphics” was only referenced 15 times during one year. None of these instances contained information on specific craft practices or 3D printing.

Becoming familiar with the existing communication resources within the community was very beneficial to our general understanding of the community, the environment, and the personnel necessary to create an advantageous learning environment for children with VI. Yet, we noted that this research was very time consuming and expensive. Parents and TVIs are very busy and have limited time to attend special trainings and meetings outside of their teaching role. In some cases there are tactile graphics specialists to create individualized content for children and support the teachers, but this is rare due to budget allocations. We also found that TVI’s and parent’s exposures to graphic creation and 3D printing were limited.

In turn, we identified four unique design ideas surrounding the use of 3D printers to reduce this barrier to entry and to increase knowledge sharing between stakeholders about the child’slearning milestones [8]. These include: 1) Content for an 3D tactile book digital library, with downloadable 3D picture books and a community forum, where for people can share their experiences and needs while creating tactile graphics; 2) A communication device between parents and TVIs that focuses on sharing observations of learning milestones; 3) Software that enables parents or TVIs to input data about a child’s needs and interests, in turn producing a books suggestion and kit of parts to 3D print; 4) Touch-receptive sensors to recognize a child’s engagement with the book’s surface. [3].

These design ideas and the preceding research create a closed-loop approach to improving access to tactile picture books and resources to create these tactile graphics. (Figure 1).

We choose to focus on creating a 3D picture book library first because it makes content readily, supports a community that has a need for specialized, child specific learning aids, and to use emerging technology as an incentive for parents to become engaged in learning how to design tactile picture books for their children and support emergent literacy skills. We realized that the aim of creating a public forum for the community to share and exchange resources on designing printing 3D tactile picture books complements the development of the other design ideas.

3. CONTENT CREATION Given the lack of publically available and easily replicable tactile picture books, and the complexity of creating tactile graphics, our

first aim was to create enjoyable and relevant books for our readers. To develop the initial content for the library, we began an iterative and user-centered process. Throughout the process of developing the first 3D printed book, we continued direct outreach and participation in the community and conducted several rounds of in-person and online outreach efforts to solicit feedback. Subsequently we used a 3D printed picture as a design probe to reach a broader audience. This revealed the challenges and advantages associated with 3D printing as seen by our respondents, which will inform future research on 3D modeling and printing as well building a community of practice. [4]

3.1 Iterative Book Design

The first 3D printed tactile picture book we created was a transcription of the classic book, “Goodnight Moon”, by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd. We obtained permission from the publisher of this book. The focus of the initial prototype was to learn about the 3D printing process and the strength, texture, malleability of the 3D printed pages. (Figure 2). We transcribed the image by combining several perspectives in an effort make objects distinct to touch. For example, we represent the bed in an orthogonal view, while objects around the room are presented in plan or sectional view depending on what representation communicates the tactile information best. [10] We showed the book to four TVIs to get initial feedback. Their responses focused on how to simplify the image by focusing on the level of abstraction of the image.

Our second attempt at obtaining feedback about the book involved submitting it to the Typhlo & Tactus Tactile Book Competition. Our entree was accepted into the competition and was selected as one of the top five submissions and was sent onto a competition at the international level. Through involvement in this competition we received feedback from the judges, who said “very interesting possibilities” and “keep exploring it.” We received feedback that the plastic models are harder to interpret than rich textures, and similar to the previous feedback from the TVIs, the judges recommended that “only one or very few objects” should be shown per page, since our trial to replicate all objects shown at the original page makes the page too complicated. (Figure 3).

4. DIGITAL COMMUNITY The acceptance of our work in this competition prompted us to create a webpage to provide a forum for people within our intended user-group to inquire about our methods; we published a photo gallery of the tactile version Goodnight Moon. We also

Figure 1. Target Community

Figure 2. 3D tactile model of the original picture

Figure 3. The Design Prototype

322

reached out do various 3D modeling practitioners via Twitter, one of whom works at OpenSCAD and develops a 3D braille creator. OpenSCAD is a free software for creating solid 3D CAD models. Via Twitter we started communicating about our work and posted photos to show how we wanted to use his software. He retweeted this photo, which was subsequently retweeted 5 times, and favorited 3 times. While these numbers are not large, we saw almost three times the traffic on our website. Additionally, one of the twitter followers is a publisher of copyright-free children books. He shared our project on his website, which increased visitorship to our website two-fold since we published the tactile version of Goodnight Moon to our website.

5. DESIGN PROBE Harkening back to the difficulty of gaining the attention of people through on the ground efforts, we saw this increased visitorship as an opportunity to obtain feedback from a wider audience. On our website we offered single 3D printed pages to solicit feedback. 3D printing afforded us ease in replicability, a key challenge in creating tactile graphics [5]. To date, we have received 28 requests to date and we have printed and sent nearly 60 design probes (Figure 4). Directly after we receive an inquiry, we send two pages from Goodnight Moon and request general feedback.

6. FINDINGS All of the individuals who inquired about the 3D printed picture book pages (design probes) indicated an interest in 3D printing of tactile graphics and picture books. The respondents were self-identified stakeholders who want to improve opportunities for children and others with sensory, cognitive, or other physical disabilities, including visual impairment, dementia, and autism—a range of interest broader than our initial intent. Many of our requestors did not mention who they are exactly, but implicitly indicated they are parents of blind kids, by saying “I have a son who is blind…”, indicate they are professor, by saying “I teach Cognitive and Developmental Psychology to…”, etc. Scholars: We received inquiries from scholars from different fields of study (developmental psychology, art and design, photography, and cognitive science). The majority of them work directly with people with VI and wanted information to discriminate to others within their professional community. Some indicated their specific domain interest, including: interactive mapping, tactile perception research, design research. Other scholars requested the design probes to display at upcoming events to promote the use of 3D printers or advanced methods within the domain of STEM education for people with disabilities. One of the respondents was looking for new methods to inspire students to focus on diverse populations. “Our students opt for careers working with special needs youth. The tactile nature of these books would appeal to the students as hands-on learners.”

TVI’s: TVIs who requested pages identified time as the biggest hindrances to their work, and spoke of this issue in respect to making tactile graphics "I teach beginning braille readers and it takes forever to make the tactual pictures for books." Speaking directly about 3D printing, one teacher shared, “We had the opportunity to see a 3D printer at a conference, but had not seen it used as shown in your pictures. We did not pursued a 3D printer is the time required and the difficulty of programming for making the 3D forms.” The benefits of supporting TVI’s in efficiently and effectively creating tactile graphics were further articulated by one TVI who explained their role in parents’ lives. “We have the capability to change the written material into

Braille, which many of our parents would not be able to do. 3D printing could enhance our ability to provide for parents.” Braille Transcriptionists and Designers: To date we have received three inquiries from braille transcriptionist and designers who work for public schools, who are searching for new ways to create tactile graphics, and who want to learn how to use 3D printers to create custom models. They report that they are working on behalf of students in need of this technology, are excited about the promise of 3D printing. “We also have 3D printers at several of our schools and I am seeing great promise for the possibility of producing our own 3D tactile books in the future.” They also disclosed their current practices and needs for 3D printing. “I currently use Swell Touch paper to make raised-line images or try to find pre-made, small scale models,” and describe themselves as a bridge of information to others in their profession. “I promise I would share your book with others. I'd just love to see ( feel) it!"

Parents: We received seven inquiries from parents of young children, five of whom have children with a visual impairment, one with a child with autism, and one with sighted “mechanically inclined children.” The commonality between all respondents was the fact that they were looking for resources to keep their children’s attention in the reading experience, a key factor in developing emergent literacy skills [1] Several of the parents indicated that they are seeking ways to motivate their children to engage in the reading experience. “She is struggling with motivation to learn Braille. I think tactile picture books will help her develop tactile discrimination and get her interested in Braille." Several requests indicated that by sending them the tactile picture book pages they would be exposed to 3D printing and become empowered to learn more about the 3D printing process. “There are no 3D printers in our world! But if I had a copy of this book, there would be!"

Other Community: We received a range of additional requests from people that identified themselves with other communities and see an application of our work. For example a unit manager a long term nursing center working with residents with dementia was looking for sensory items for their residents. Another respondent works for an NGO that provides arts and accessibility services to people with disabilities and wanted to use 3D printing. Other respondents indicated working for their town libraries.

7. DISCUSSION By creating a platform for respondents to contact us, and by using a design probe we received a much greater range and depth of feedback than we were able to obtain through initial fieldwork and in-person participation in the community. We attribute this finding a method that accommodates TVI and parents need to be efficient with their time and do things on their own schedule. While most of the information the design probe provided related to our requesters needs, the 3D printed pages of Goodnight Moon provided general design feedback about the specific models, disclosed some of the complexities around creating tactile graphics, and validated the exploration of using 3D printing for these purposes. Many respondents were surprised about the quality of the 3D printing, for example the detail of the cow and mouse as shown in Figure 4. Respondents also liked that we represented different perspectives to distinguish characteristics about an objects, such as an upright mouse and side view of the cow. They did wanted more detail on some of the objects, such as a tail of mouse, which is the key character of the animal, as well as vivid and contrasting colors on the model. Many respondents indicated that parts of the 3D models are easily removed from the base page, indicating that our current 3D models are not designed

323

robust enough. This feedback challenges us to find the correct level of abstraction to express the key characters of objects precisely, while creating models simple enough to minimize other trivial features. We will continue to refine our models and send out design probes to solicit more feedback.

From the highest level, this work was motivated by the desire to gain information about how and why people create tactile graphics and how 3D printing can facilitate these processes, in an effort to find ways to support parents and teachers of children with VI with emergent literacy needs. While pursuing the idea of developing an online library, and the content (books), the potential of using social media to access this hard to reach population became ostensible as an effective practice, as well as using these digital connections to direct people to our website and build a community of practice [4] around “making” with and for the visually impaired. By using this digital social networking tool, people were directed to our website, which enabled us to reach our intended user group in a way that suited their needs and motivations, as opposed to requesting them to break their routines. The use of the design probes and website provided a casual yet accessible communication channel between researcher and the community. We hypothesize that this approach will yield fruitful results in efforts to further understanding the need space and establish relationships by sharing their findings during interaction each other. Our aim is to help participants feel like they are contributing to their own community, while providing them a bank of growing resources to help in their self-directed endeavors (as opposed to research subjects). Considering the participants’ time and resource limitations, we also aim to consolidate various disparate resources to build open virtual/online community in a forum they are already using (the internet and social media).

Throughout our work with this community, we have noted a value of openness in the exchange of information. This furthers our hypothesis that there is an opportunity to create platform where people can share ideas and further knowledge sharing. From scholars to TVI’s, stakeholders readily share insight about the creation of tactile graphics. As one TVI said, “We have some very talented Teachers of the Visually Impaired on our team that could both utilize what you have developed and hopefully develop programs to share back to your group."

8. FUTURE WORK In section 2 of this paper we displayed a holistic loop of our design ideas, by pursuing the “Online Library” design idea creating preliminary content for the library, we were able to gather important information from respondents. All of the information we obtain from respondents about their wants and need concerning using 3D printers for the creation of tactile graphics will contribute to the four designs indicated.

Using social media and online communication and design probes will continue to influence our method in how to reach participants. As we continue to refine our design probes, we hope that feedback will become more and more specific. We plan to embed solar sensors and/or conductive paint onto the surface of the 3D printed models to obtain immediate feedback (finger touch spots) about what part of the images attract a child’s attention.

These “Sensing Tactile Pictures,” will provide parents, teachers, and researchers feedback about their child’s engagement with the book that may otherwise go undetected.

We will continue to explore how social media as well as in person communication can expand our reach and validate this work. We will include using more hashtags in our social media posting, contributing anonymous feedback from users on our site, providing direct responses to our respondents, and developing relationships to continue to understand the existing design practices. We will ask respondents to classify the types of experiences they have, as well as what learning milestones their activities were contributing to for a child. This metadata will further our analysis of how to create a “Communication Device” that shares ideas between parents and TVIs. Furthermore, have also started building the technical infrastructure for the 3D Tactile Library, which will start to host users feedback and make more books available on different smart devices. As we develop the “Tactile Picture Synthesizer,” we will confer with the findings above. In particular, we will consider the challenges of learning to use 3D modeling software and the 3D printers indicated by TVIs, which prints barriers of entry to many novice users.

REFERENCES [1] Bus, A. G., (2003). Joint Caregiver-Child Storybook

Reading: A Route to Literacy Development, Handbook of Early Literacy Research., Vol.1, ISBN/UPC 9781572306530, The Guilford Press

[2] Ferrell, K. A., Mason, L., Young, J., & Cooney, J. Forty Years of Literacy Research in Blindness and Visual Impairment. Technical Report. Greeley, CO: University of Northern Colorado, National Center on Low-Incidence Disabilities

[3] Kim, J., Stangl, A., Eisenberg, A., & Yeh, T. (2014). Tactile Picture Books for Young Children with Visual Impairment, TEI’14

[4] Lave, J. & Wenger, E., (1990). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published in 1990 as Institute for Research on Learning report 90-0013

[5] Lipson, H. & Kurman, M., (2013). Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, Wisely

[6] Philippe C., (2009). The Typhlo & Tactus Guide to Children’s Book with tactile illustrations, Les Doigts Qui Revent

[7] RNIB http://www.rnib.org.uk [8] Stangl, A., Kim, J., & Yeh, T., (2014). Technology to

Support Emergent Literacy Skills in Young Children with VI , CHI’14

[9] Suzette, W., (2013). Guide to Designing Tactile Illustrations for Children’s Books, American Printing House for the Blind

[10] Swaminathan, R., Grossberg, M. D., & Nayar, S. K., (2003) A Perspective on Distortions, IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR’03

[11] Tactile Library for the Blind and Partially Sighted, http://www.tactilelibrary.com

324