A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers | Hacker News Reader

A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers

news.mit.edu

66 pointsgnabgib12 comments

One time when I was very young, I was given some paper to draw on. It looked and felt like normal paper, but when you drew on it with a marker, it would swell up under the marker line creating a raised area. Putting a piece in water revealed that it was some sort of ultra compressed sponge, like a thin version of those compacted kitchen sponges you can get.

I realized later that it must have been some sort of "paper for the blind" so that you could draw on it or maybe print on it with an inkjet and be able to feel the surface even if you couldn't see it. Maybe it was just a sponge, but it didn't seem any thicker than normal paper. It's been 20+ years and I've never encountered anything like it since.

Tactile paper?

Thanks for that keyword: https://americanthermoform.com/product/swell-touch-paper

I'm curious what you had because swell touch paper doesn't exactly behave that way, it's thermally activated and the areas you drew on need to be heated up before they will swell.

There are sponges that come compressed flat (e.g. soldering iron sponges) and it looks like they sell larger sheets of them for some purpose as well: https://www.dickblick.com/items/hygloss-sponge-ums-pkg-of-4-...

It's great to see an automated method for this, even if it still needs to be reviewed by an expert. Back on the 2011-2014 era I was on a team which helped make materials available for a chemistry grad student. I wasn't aware of the standards book, but followed more or less the same process outlined in the paper, using GIMP to simplify images, paste into Word, and add textboxes with braille font to the images, and then embossed. It was probably 5-10 minutes of effort for a basic graph, and we were doing the work for entire math and chemistry books. This would have saved so much time for us!

We also had to figure out how to represent electron clouds. Some could be done as 2-D representations, but eventually 3-D was required. We created a plugin for Blender which would import a MacMolPlt save file, generate the structure for the molecule (coordinates for each atom, bond types connecting the atoms), and a point cloud for the electron cloud. Each column of the periodic table was a different shape, each row was a different scale. It worked pretty well, and generating STL files was automated.

The program is somewhere on my hard drive not available publicly and probably technically owned by Iowa State or the federal government, whether they know it or not. I'm curious how much it'd take to get out running on a current version of Blender.

Tactonom Reader seems like an interesting multi-modal approach that is readily available: https://www.tactonom.com/en/product/tactonomreader/

In general, tactile graphics is a long-standing issue. In the past, the most basic simple mechanical solution wasn't that bad. Just needs a special kind of paper and a ballpoint pen. My teachers used to hand-draw curves for me on demand, however, that was at high-school level...

The more complex the solution gets, the more work/knowhow is required to prepare a particular graphic. Turnaround time gets longer, and the expertise expected from the educator gets more complex. Its questionable how many casual educators end up being able/willing to prepare graphics for/on a complex digital system...

I know the Recharts[1] library have been trying to make their charts more accessibility, but so far I haven't seen any users with screen readers give feedback. If there are any users here with screenreaders, can you read the chart on this link: https://www.chartmaker.io/charts/Ra1UTI7gArCTO0o2MV4zZ

[1]: https://recharts.org/

While this looks interesting I'd like technology to make graphing more accessible to blind students. I switched from computer science to telecommunications because the graphs got complicated enough in Calc II that I couldn't pass the class. Calc III would have only been worse. Maybe new resources exist but this was over a decade ago.

You might find this R library interesting - I ran across it recently but haven't tried it myself:

https://github.com/jooyoungseo/tactileR

Unfortunately it does still require you to have a swell touch machine and swell touch paper, neither of which are particularly cheap.

> Unfortunately it does still require you to have a swell touch machine and swell touch paper, neither of which are particularly cheap.

I had a look online and they don't look too expensive: 'only' 3-4x the cost of a regular printer. Accessibility typically always has a high price (for stupid reasons, but still) but this isn't the highest I've seen...

"Heartwarming! This 2-year-old's family couldn't afford his $20,000 electric wheelchair, and their insurance didn't cover it. So, a high school robotics team burned down the insurer's headquarters"

>Unfortunately it does still require you to have a swell touch machine and swell touch paper, neither of which are particularly cheap.

i wonder if a typical children 3d pen, or the likes - ie. dispensing quickly curing plastic thread, etc. - can be used to quickly hand-draw touch-accessible picture/graph on any surface really (or even in 3d as it is intended). A cheap 3d printer can probably be used when more complicated picture and/or several copies of it have to be done (one can probably even print a stack of copies in one run) and again having 3d may help to communicate more info for touch (and running 3d pen as the printing head instead of the standard thermoplastic head would allow to increase the speed while decreasing precision which may be fine in many situations).

> I wonder if a typical children 3d pen, or the likes - ie. dispensing quickly curing plastic thread, etc. - can be used to quickly hand-draw touch-accessible picture/graph on any surface really (or even in 3d as it is intended)

Yes, there are a number of ways to make accessible graphics and this is one of them, although I don't see educators using it as often. Here's a study I read about blind people using a 3D pen to make drawings themselves (you can get it on SciHub if you're curious): https://doi.org/10.1177/0145482X20954759

> A cheap 3d printer can probably be used when more complicated picture and/or several copies of it have to be done

Actually educators of blind folks are making great use of 3D printing for tactile models. This site has a lot of great links if you're interested in the topic: https://printdisability.org/about-us/accessible-graphics/3d-...

> running 3d pen as the printing head instead of the standard thermoplastic head would allow to increase the speed while decreasing precision

I doubt very much that this would work. 3D printing pens may have a wider nozzle, but they extrude more slowly and I'd imagine they also have much lower thermal output than a 3D printer because 3D pen users must frequently pause to reposition or make decisions. Essentially a 3D pen is just a very cheap, cut-down 3D printer hotend. However, you can always put a wider nozzle into an ordinary printer, and you can print on paper if you're really constrained by speed and don't want to lay down a base plate.

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