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Empowerment of differently-abled
{{contributorFullName}} | 28-04-2016
The Tactograph is a 2D tactile printer that traces out a predefined picture using a fluid adhesive to make tactile books for children with visual impairment, low vision or partial vision.
Several years ago, Chetana Trust, took five children’s books from a local publisher and made 100 fully accessible copies. The process was hand-made and very labour intensive, but the results were spectacular. Chetana tested the developed books in village schools among first generation learners, in inclusive pre-schools and across children who had varied disabilities. The results were the same – the tactile images drew and kept the attention of the children, helped them understand the story and freed their minds to imagine and discover in rich and wonderful ways. Children, teachers and families begged for more books and greater numbers. This request for greater numbers could only be reasonably met with some form of mechanization. Existing technologies were expensive and exclusive – that is, the book made for the visually impaired would be unattractive to the sighted child or much too expensive for it to be viable unless heavily subsidized.
The Tactograph was conceived as a simple, low-cost innovative answer to this problem. The basic design was developed through the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technologies at IIT Madras, with constant feedback from end users, Chetana and professional Printing Houses, to ensure that the aesthetics were maintained along with the quality of tactile images.
The Tactograph requires very little training for independent use, uses cheap material, and requires no heating or special papers or materials. The quality of the lines and images is excellent and the beauty of the original picture can be kept intact simply by using colourless fevicol. The material made can thus stay useful to children with and without vision and augment everyone’s experience without removing or reducing any pleasure. One key advantage of a Tactograph is that it can be used to print individual assignments and can be printed on any sheet of paper when compared to the expensive styrofoam sheets. As it works on the principle of extrusion, no such heating element is involved ensuring safety for children and in a school environment.
Tactograph creates significant impact by leveraging the intelligence of touch and feel. By printing picture books, transparent colour light sheets and sign boards, the teachers can feed images in their minds and unleash creativity.
1. Special Schools: On testing the pace of learning new shapes with tactile images, children with vision disability were found to grasp new shapes faster. This impacted the method of teaching, and teachers were appreciative about the concept of building customised lesson plans and activities for children, which coherently resulted in a more imaginative form of learning.
2. Community Centers: Visually impaired children can now attend tactile demonstrations during a storytelling event for an explanation of a scenario, an experience that was previously unavailable.
3. Book Publishers: Tactograph could be set up at book publishing units where tactile books can be printed based on print to order. Certain books on special request can be converted into tactile print, which is made available to schools where inclusive learning is given importance.
4. Block Resource Centres, SSA: Testing across children with a range of disabilities brought an awareness about the power of the tactile element to draw and hold a child’s attention. During the testing, a child with adhd and emerging speech sat through the entire reading, touching each picture and even initiating a few words; a child with autism who usually tears books was captivated by the tactile pictures and returned to details repeatedly, exploring and then looking at the adult for explanations and words. Teachers were convinced about the value of the images and excited at seeing unexpected ability demonstrated by their own students.
By making use of a very low cost and easily accessible fluid adhesive for printing, Tactograph succeeds in lowering the device cost to INR 25000 and also allows teachers to build customized lesson plans for less than INR 10 – a modest price to pay for building a future for these kids.
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