TRANSCRIPT
Creating Digital Tactile Graphics
2-23-26

>>Donna: I'm Dr. Donna Clemens and we are here to -- I'm here with Sue O'Brien. Awesome teammates. To talk about digital tactile graphics today. 

>>Sue: Hi, everybody. I'm Sue O'Brien. I am a National Library Service certified Braille TSBVIer, adapted materials coordinator here at TSBVI. I have had the great good fortune to have been working here for the last 18 years and I create Braille for all subject areas, all age and grades. I also have been doing 3D printing for the past 15 years and it's become a larger and larger part of our materials production process here at TSBVI. 

>>Donna: And I'm Donna Clemens. I'm an assistive technology consultant with our Outreach department. And I have 27 years as a TSVI and have gotten technically TDB -- since we don't have our certification process yet -- or I haven't taken it yet -- since 2015. And just graduated with that PhD in May. During our session, if you have a question, please make sure you put that in the chat and we will ensure if it is coming up in what we're talking about, we will let you know. Or if it's something we can stop and answer. We want to make sure all your questions get answered. Sue. 

>>Sue: Thank you, Donna. So just what is a tactile graphic? I think one of the best definitions ever came from the 2010 Braille authority of North America in the standards and guidelines for tactile graphics. And it talked about graphics are not just a mere, like redo of a print image or illustration in just a raised line format, but it's a transformed representation of the images. And it's transformed for the sense of touch. We always get this question: When is a graphic necessary? And we find that studies are indicating that 74% of the textbooks oftentimes, almost all the worksheets we deal with contain graphics. Graphics are necessary -- extremely necessary. Because most of them are supporting or they extend the meaning in the text. Now, looking at the summertime math worksheet over here on the right, do we need to draw ice cream cones and suns and ice tea glasses or Kool-Aid glasses? I don't think so. We are do other shapes that maybe are more meaningful for our students to represent these items. This was a study that has really surprised me over the years, that comprehension of graphical material was found to be a strong predictor of overall comprehension. And more so than the three predictors that are listed below. And that was words read correctly per minute. Listening comprehension and cognitive flexibility. This study really surprised me but watching students here, as soon as you start to see that they're getting more and more graphics, it really makes a difference in their understanding and comprehension of the material they're working with. Now, when we talked about what graphics are always redone, and those are any primary graphic. In other words, any picture, a chart, an image, table, graph that's part of the question. Those always have to be reproduced. And whenever possible, we want to reproduce secondary graphics because that information usually extends the text. It's usually not always a part of the question but extends the meaning in the text. It's important because it offers an alternative mapping for understanding the content. We know with ourselves that oftentimes just reading the content. But if there's a picture or a chart, a graph, that that makes it more meaningful for us -- or maybe easier to understand than just a text description on its own. And we all know that for our students within our Expanded Core Curriculum, tactile graphics support the development of their -- easy for me to say. Compensatory skill and their sensory efficiency. And we know that graphical understanding plays an important role in their orientation and mobility also by building spatial understanding. One of the things that I found kind of interesting with a student I've had over the years was he had a number of different fidgets that you could kind of take them apart and put them together and reassemble them. And the student had the most outstanding spatial understanding of things. And it seemed as he got older and he was in higher-level math classes, that he did so well in geography. He also did well in coding and he did extremely well doing some 3D printing. But he had such a great understanding first of all, you know, of how this tactile ability. And, of course, cognitive development. Always appreciate this. It came from our own Narney Loftin. Students who are blind often demonstrate strong concrete learning but they may require explicit instruction and structured experiences to support that development of abstract thinking. 

>>Donna: And we have some examples of that concept development. If our student is given, say, a black line outline of a fish, if they don't have that foundational understanding, like this little one does holding up his catch of the day with a big grin on his face. Then that outline won't make as much sense to them because they won't have that frame of reference. So we need to be very careful when we're doing tactile graphics to be sure that the student has the experiential knowledge and concept knowledge to support those tactile graphics. Because the worst thing we would want is to have a kiddo with lots of vocabulary about a tactile graphic but no true understanding of what that object in real life actually is. Sue said 3D printing and we thought this one was just cool as can be. Great koi fish. 

>>Sue: Yeah. It was just luck that it printed out in the color shades it did. This is actually a variegated filament that had blues and greens in it. But the way this printed out, the timing of it was perfect with that filament. 

>>Donna: Although it's not the real object, a 3D object can be used to provide a great deal of information like fins, tails. And the way the fish would kind of undulate the way this is printed. If the real object is not safe or not available, we could use an alternative object. Just remember that plastic is plastic is plastic and it all has the same type of feel, even though we can try to print for texture, there is -- if a kiddo feels a 3D-printed fish and a tactile, that is not going to represent the coldness or the scaleyness of the actual fish. 

>>Sue: Or maybe the sliminess. This is a 3D model of the epidermis that one of our students is taking a class over at the local high school here in Austin, Texas. She's taking anatomy. This is a five-layer model of epidermis with hair follicles coming out of it. There's also arteries and veins. You can see down at the bottom that they're red and blue. And they also come out on the other side. When she took this model to class, it became -- everybody wanted to work with this. It could be taken apart. They could talk about each layer. So oftentimes doing these things for our students, everybody in the classroom benefits from these models. 

>>Donna: So if we have introduced our early concepts, then when we bring in the smaller, more academic tasks, those skills would transfer. So bringing in more types and more examples and more familiarity with the concepts before we get to those picture levels. So having those field trips and things to get our kiddos exposed to all of those concepts that we have in our testing. Looking at not reinventing the wheel. A lot of times we get requests as TVIs for parts of the flowers in our worksheets. It's working with the teacher of record to see what's available. Science, for example, from APH is a lovely set of already-made tactiles, tactile image library. You know, our old textbooks that have already been Brailled. Even though it may not be an adopted textbook, there may be graphics in there already that you can use. Old tests. So those released tests that have graphics in them that are used year in, year out are pretty similar. So we could use those as well. These are more examples of some complex graphics. A lot of times we see these in STAAR or in testing, such as the -- I think this is the rain cycle or the environmental cycle here. The other is a Thermoform of a chickadee. Just happened to read that Braille really fast. I didn't even know that was a chickadee. So a Thermoform of a chickadee and a weather tactile graphic. Those are very nicely made and lovely. But if the student doesn't understand those complex kind of decoding of that graphic, that chickadee may be quite difficult to tell what's wing, what's beak and is it flying or is it sitting. So those concepts we would discuss. Books are great connections to general instruction for activity. So are they ready for tactile graphics. There is a set of books -- oh, well. My Amazon just decided to pop up on that one. It's called "beginning with Braille." There we go. It happened my sign-in before it happened to show. We have Beginning with Braille here. Be careful with your purchasing on sites. Sometimes they can put AFB Press things very highly priced. I would check with AFB. Beginning with Braille is a wonderful place to start for experience with literacy and building those concepts. Reading Connection is also another good AFB Press item that gives you wonderful strategies for teaching these same kind of context. Sorry. We're going to take a look at tactile graphics image library in a little bit. They can also help you with assessing the skills of where your student is at the moment. And what skill progression you need to teach tactile graphics. So readiness for tactiles in early learning. If your student has some medical or motor issues that can impact their ability to explore tactile materials. Tactile graphics can be very detailed with shading and other things, so we may have to work on getting the reaching out and the exploring. That positional concept of we're starting at the top left and exploring across and down. That becomes very, very important when we look at some of our high-tech devices, which we will in a moment. The positional concepts of being able to organize their tactile graphics and explore their tactile graphics. Recognizing different textures and identifying symbols and objects. Those are all skills that our early learners need to start developing to be able to explore and read efficiently those tactile graphics. This list comes from the Early Learning Tactile Profile, TSBVI. And there's also some assessments that we can look at for K-12 to see if they're ready for tactile graphics. And that is the Braille readiness grid, the assessment Braille literacy skills, and the Braille requisite skills inventory. And I believe we've linked all of those in the handout. If not, I can put them over in the chat when I hand it over to Sue. There are examples of commercial and teacher-made tactile books. We've seen them in APH. There's a lot of different types of tactiles that have the story pieces within the book so the student can retell the story with the pieces while they're learning the Braille. And explore the pictures while they're doing them. Those are becoming more and more popular 

>>Sue: Hey, Donna, can we go to that last one again? 

>>Donna: Sure! 

>>Sue: One of the things I like to do, it says that ability to discriminate textures. One of the things I like to do with students is I won't actually make test pages of various textures in the various type of graphics to recreate. For instance, we have some textures they are put on there. They are patterns. And if we're going to do something with Thermoform, on our master we have the crafty papers that you can get through APH. And I like to see what ones -- can students distinguish one from the other. We don't want to spend a lot of time creating a graphic and find out that oh, gee, nobody can read that texture or no one can feel that pattern. It doesn't feel any different than a solid would on there. I like to test things early in the school year so that I know what ones are going to work best for our students. 

>>Donna: Great point. Great point. I used to have a rule -- and I don't know if it applies anymore. But a rule for myself. I don't want to spend more than three times making the graphic than the student's going to be using it. That's just a random three I grabbed there for a moment, just to give you some example. If you're spending three hours making a graphic the student's going to use for ten seconds, is that something that we want to spend our time making? Does it really mean something to the student? Is it going to be applied to the assignment they're doing? Or is it just a pretty graphic? And graphics don't always have to be pretty. They have to have meaning. Some of my graphics that have meant the most to my students have not be visually pretty but they have been meaningful for the student. Especially when the student's constructing their own. And those are very powerful graphics. If the students are constructing their own graphics, I'm not sticking to we're going to make it look pretty. I'm sticking to is it going to mean something for that kiddo. So if we're looking at our skills progression for tactile graphics, is the student understanding those positionals? Top, bottom, left, right? Are they able to track a textured line? Textured lines that intersect each other? Once we get into those tactile graphics, we're going to have lines intersecting each other and a lot of movement. Can they track those? Do they recognize objects in a 3D graphic? So have we done that training of the solid cube to the mat of the cube and the diagram of the cube -- diagram of the mat to connect those skills with each other. Are they using a systematic search pattern when exploring graphics? Again, that's going to be really important when we investigate some high-tech stuff in just a minute. And do they understand, like Sue said, those varying textures. When we're working with skills progression, playing, playing, playing. Lots of these early skills can be taught through play. Experiential learning and talking through what you're doing with each other. When rocking a baby doll, we're rocking the baby doll left to right, up and down, on our knees. And we're talking about all those body positions so that we can then talk about those same positions when we're looking at an object or a page. Are we talking about sticky and fluffy and wet and cold and all of those other items that go with tactile graphics. We can tie into our O&Ms for that. Are we walking on a hard sidewalk and we're walking left to right, forward. We're looking left to right. When we're talking with our APE folks, when we're working on tactiles and following the line on our goal ball court. Getting our orientation. So we can connect all those folks in with getting to learn our tactile graphics. APH has new sports tactile graphics that would be wonderful to help with our APE and O&M folks. So determining what tactile graphics to use in the classroom. We're going to revisit this real quick. What's the task? Is the student familiar with the concept? Do they have the skill level to interpret the graph? If we can't answer these three things as our student is ready for them, then we may need to revisit some things before we introduce this tactile graphic. 

>>Sue: I would also like to say, Donna, that our initial question there, what's the task? That should be the first thing we ask when we're analyzing a print image and we're going to make a tactile image, "what's the task?" should be our guiding question as to how we reproduce this for touch. 

>>Donna: Absolutely. We could be given a picture of the item but the item is where the student is. I think this is back over to you, Sue. 

>>Sue: Okay. Thank you, Donna. Yeah, always keeping in mind that we want to make that graphic just as clear as possible and keep the clutter off of it. Looking at a lot of graphics, at times, there's oftentimes things on there that would add clutter to it rather than keeping it nice and clean. Keep in mind the point of view of the Braille reader. Rather than looking at through our own -- through our sight, it's up to us, when we're making these, to present that information so that the student is able to actually do the task they're being asked to do with it. And that is, again, that's the number one thing to keep in mind. You want to look at the shapes on there and textures and what's necessary to convey the concept. Can it be a simple geometric shape or can Braille signs be used to represent the concept? Whatever is going to be best for the student is what we should be producing. We want to, again, omit unnecessary parts. We want -- whatever the task is, we want the student to focus on, we want that to be the main focus of the diagram. And when you're doing this, you want to keep in mind the knowledge, the skill level, and also the age level of the reader. You know, think about with a younger student with very small hands, a very large shape is going to be more difficult to follow than something that's maybe a little bit smaller. So we may have to make these kind of adjustments to it. We do always want to make our graphics, you know, according to the standards and guidelines. And they have recommendations for line weights. But with those early learners or even older students who are developing tactile skill, sometimes we need to make our lines heavier, always with the idea that down the road we'll be moving them into more standardized graphics. But we want them to be able to develop the skill in order to do that. You want to determine if, you know, what kind of -- you want to make sure the labels on your graphics are correct, that they're close enough to the point they're labeling. That the student understands this is a label. And you want to make sure -- in some cases in your lines and angles on there have to be reproduced, you want to create the proper scale for that too. If they're going to be measuring angles, you want to make sure that that represents exactly what the print does. Again, I guess we keep saying this. Keep it simple. Eliminate the unnecessary. And then always edit or proofread your graphic yourself. Try to follow those lines with your fingers. If you've got lines that have crossed, can you follow it with your eyes closed or do you get off on the other line? If so, we need to maybe go back and relook at that. One of the things that we do when we're creating them -- especially for swell paper -- is we print them out first just on regular paper and really take a good look at that before we commit that product to swell paper. But we always make sure that those are -- you know, that way we can catch any errors. Especially we start to see, oh, that label isn't correct or that heading, there's an error there. We can get that taken care of before we actually committed our work to Swell paper. And, of course, there's lots of different ways to do this. Sometimes those low-tech tactile graphics are actually more meaningful than some of the really more elaborate ones. I've seen some of the most fantastic, hand-made with textured paper, Wikki Stix and all kind of things. Popsicle sticks. This is low-tech also is a way to really involve your students in things. One of our math teachers at middle school happens -- she is blind. She actually has the students in her math class create bar graphs. Because she said this is one way for me to know that the students actually understand the concept of bar graphs when they create one. These are sometimes some of the most interesting tactile graphics. And I'm just amazed at the creativity that they come up with. Kind of a medium tech is that Swell paper. I guess some people call that little device that it goes through, the toaster. 

>>Donna: Toaster. 

>>Sue: There is also Thermoform. Those graphics tend to be a little more involved because you usually make a master copy and then that can be reproduced. We will do that here with Thermoform for graphics where we need a lot of them. Because that Thermoform plastic is also much less expensive than the Swell paper. And, of course, electronic labelers. And I just got -- I was just allowed to borrow an electronic labeler from one of our other departments, that little dot six is just a gem of a little machine for labels. 

>>Donna: I adore the Dot Six. I have one. It's amazing. It will kick out those labels quick as can be and with some puff paint or some tactile tape, I can whip out some quick graphs pretty nicely. And then we have our high-tech. This is where we're about to have a demo, y'all. I'm so excited! Our embossers are considered our high-text production and refreshable Braille. We say moving quickly into reality and yes, they are. Yes, we have one right here to be able to demo today on what a tactile graphic looks like on a multi-line display. The Monarch. I have this right now and I am going to be using -- this is our first of its kind display that uses 10 lines that will result in being able to explore a tactile graphic that's 11.5x11-inch. More complicated graphs can allow you to zoom in and zoom out to see more details. So the graphs I'm using today are going to be from APH graphic image library but Sue is going to fill us in on how those are -- well, how the new Braille editor is going to be getting us some items. So if we look over at our tactile image library -- it closed out on me here. I am going to use 50 states. I'm going to show you what it looks like. It's this one right here. I'm going to be pulling up this big old graphic right here on the Monarch display that is 50 states. So let me get over here. This is the print of what you see on the Monarch and then you have my hands over the Monarch here. I'm going to go to our tactile image library. And I previously loaded this map. So the tactile graphic you will see here is the one that is going to be here. And on the visual and even on the Braille, that looks kind of jumbled, right? You really can't get any data from this. What is lovely about the Monarch is that I can say, okay. I know this is the states. I've got Washington up here. I failed geography, so forgive me if I get it wrong. I know I have down here Florida, because I used to live there. I know where that one is. Cool thing about the Monarch is I can say, okay. I want to look closely at Florida. I can zoom in. And it takes me right to Florida. And now I can explore that I have Florida here. I have FL for the label. But what do I have up here? I have another state up here. Guess what. Y'all, I can move. This gives me a pan and a scroll and I can move my graphic up and say, okay. Florida is sliding off the Monarch and I now have Georgia and South Carolina on my screen. And I can go left and right. And now I have the edge of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. And I can keep going over sideways. I can pop back out and say now I want to look at Alaska. And I can jump in and now I have Alaska. So you can see where our tactile graphics are going from where they've been. I just wanted to give everybody a show of what this handy dandy tool, that costs us a bit, but you can see that a student who understands tactile graphics can then access their own graphics and scroll and zoom and pull out. And the world of independence, once we've taught those low tech and mid-tech skills, that they can transfer into the high-tech realm. Let me see if I can get everything back on here. So that was a quick demo of the tactile graphics image library. Just to let you know, I looked this up and just to show you what it looks like in the image. But the student can go right into tactile graphics image library from their Monarch and pull up anything they have a title for or can search for. So it's native to the device, which means instant graphics. The file format for tactile graphics in the Monarch is they have to be saved as a PDF. If you have all of the standards met for their production, it has to be saved as a PDF. We want to make sure we're not labeling with words, we're actually labeling with Braille font, because that's the only way it will render. If I put text Monarch across the top, it will render the text as a drawing, not as Braille. So we want to make sure we have the right tools in there. And I'm going to hand it over to Sue for all the cool stuff in Microsoft Word. 

>>Sue: Hi, everybody again. We create just about all of our graphics here in Microsoft Word. We do so -- we use our document format as the.doc, not.docx. You can save it as a PDF, it doesn't matter. If it's just the Microsoft PDF choice that you have when you're saving the document or if you have Adobe Acrobat, that will be an add-in into Word and you can save it as the Adobe Acrobat PDF. I have seen no difference whether it's Word or Adobe, they both retain all the information. And here you can see the graphic on the right. That is a bar chart. And notice that there's two bars on there that the student has to compare. This is a texture one. It's an area texture on that that we have tested with students and know that it is discernable from just the plain, empty bar. 

>>Donna: And that's something to keep in mind with your higher tech. We are not there to be able to shade yet so it's either pins are either up or down. There is no intermediate shading. When you're creating tactile graphics, we need to keep our production in mind. Are we embossing this that will allow for shading or are we sending it to a device, like a Monarch, where shading isn't available? 

>>Sue: Okay. So one of the things we've done is show you here in Word. Here I happen to have Adobe Acrobat on my computer and so I've given the option, under the "save as," to save it as an Adobe PDF. If you don't have that, you'll still have the option to save as a PDF, but it will be just generated by Microsoft. So you don't have -- if you don't have Adobe, you don't have to buy special software in order to create the PDF. 

>>Kaycee: Hey, Sue. This is Kaycee. We have a question in the chat asking about the Braille font in Word, if you use the Braille font in Word. If so, what font size? 

>>Sue: I do. We make all our labels in Word. We're going to talk a little bit more about this. I use the Swell Braille font and it's set at 22 points. Now, I have seen in forms out there, people are looking at their Swell Braille font and noticing some of the dots aren't in the right place. I don't know who or what but somebody has messed with that. But if you have an older version like I do, the version I have on my computer was created in -- I believe it was either 2007 or 2009. I keep that file so if anybody wanted to get a hold of me, I would gladly share the older font with them so that it is correct. The dots are all in the correct place. Now, a little bit about images. Let me ask: Kaycee, did I answer their question? 

>>Kaycee: Yes, ma'am. 

>>Sue: Okay. Thank you. 

>>Kaycee: One more question. Sorry, Sue. Why convert to the PDF and not just keep the Word? 

>>Sue: The Monarch takes a PDF and it holds the image in place. All of the graphics in the tactile graphic library from APH are also PDFs. They are not Word files. One of the problems that happens with Word files is you don't always know if the font is available it's a good idea to save these as a PDF and not do -- and not try to upload Word documents. 

>>Kaycee: Perfect. Thank you. 

>>Donna: If your student has a device that's not the Monarch, say it's a different device, then we want to make sure we save it in a file format that's going to be stable for transfer to them. It looks like Sue O -- hey, Sue is in the room. She says the same thing happened to her with the font. And Duxbury has been informed of the problem. So, yay! 

>>Sue: A little bit about images here. It's important to know the difference between different types of images. I think we've probably all experienced we've wanted to download a shape or something from the internet, rather than draw it. And we find out that when you enlarge that, that it becomes very pixelated and not very usable. Those are bitmaps and they are raster images. When you try to enlarge them, you'll notice with all those pixels that they really lose their clarity and become very blurry. Those will not work as images for the Monarch or for any other device. Or they don't work well even on Swell paper. What we do want are scalable vector graphics. And these are graphics that you're drawing the line but it's actually behind the scenes, it's a mathematical description of that line or the shape or the curve.Down you're dealing with an SVG file or shape when you resize it to see there's no loss of clarity or quality in the lines of the shapes. That's what makes it ideal for the diagrams. Charts, maps, and other line drawings that we need to use. And it makes SVG objects excellent for tactile graphics. 

>>Donna: As you saw when I was demoing the Monarch there for a second, that I was able to zoom in and out and go into a graphic at the -- at more of a minor point instead of seeing the overall graphic. When we use our SVG graphics then they retain their clarity when the Monarch zooms in and out. Just like Sue says, they keep everything clear when we're printing. They also maintain that clarity when Monarch is going. 

>>Sue: So one of the things we've done here is have made a list of some of the SVG drawing programs. We used, like I said, Microsoft Word. It is a very powerful SVG drawing tool and a little bit easier to -- I would say less learning curve than jumping into something like illustrator, corre draw or Inkscape. If you have the knowledge to use those, by all means, use those. But Microsoft Word, we're usually a little bit more familiar with that program and it doesn't seem quite as intimidating. We have actually made our own tactile graphic toolbar here at TSBVI. We put all the tools on it in the order we typically use them. Also, if you notice on the far right, we have the font selections over there. And we can go ahead and change that font to the Swell Braille 24 points or another one. APH also has a nice Braille font that can be used. But all of the things that I need to do, I can do on this toolbar when it comes to drawing. It keeps my tools in one place and makes the whole production flow a lot easier than having to go hunt them up and try to figure out what it is that I need. 

>>Donna: Sue, if someone would like to have that toolbar, is there a way they can request it? 

>>Sue: Yeah. We do. We have a UI file, a user interface, for this. It also includes the productivity toolbar that was created here in Texas. And so we can definitely share that with you and tell you how to put it on to your version of Word. And of course, it's always important, when it comes to doing tactile graphics, no matter what device or how we're doing it low tech, it's a good idea to be aware of the standards and guidelines for tactile graphics and the new edition came out updated in 2022. And this has so much guidance in there. And there's also lots of examples. If you've got something particularly complicated, there's always good examples in there to go in and look at how they've done some. I use this manual all the time and especially if I'm working on something fairly complicated, to go in and look at some of the ones they've done and try to match that. 

>>Donna: Oops. How did we do that, Sue? That was very fast. 

>>Sue: Yeah. 

>>Donna: I would love to answer any questions y'all have on tactile graphics or Monarch and tactile graphics. 

>>Sue: I see someone mentioned in the chat that they have taken Co-pilot and given it prompts for a crisp, clean image. And that's also -- I think as we're moving -- 

>>Donna: We did that. 

>>Sue: As we're moving forward with AI, we're going to make this production process even faster. But I still have to add my own labels if I use an AI prompt. I need to, you know, create my own labels for that. 

>>Donna: And we did use, just for disclosure, we did use AI Nana Banana to make our headshot pictures for today. Both of these were generated by -- from real pictures of us. We added background and context of both of these. We love using AI. Or at least I do. 

>>Sue: Oh, I do too. It's my best friend. 

>>Donna: It is mine as well. Chatty and I have a very good relationship. In your handouts, all of the different items that we referenced, if it was a resource or an article or any research, we did include those in your handouts for a clickable reference.