[accessibleimage] Re: Tactile Graphics Options

Dear Lisa, Kaye, Karen, Pete -

The "Tactaudiograph" Pronounced "TACT ORDIO GRAF"!or Tactile chattering
pickie.
When Karen (Gourgey neé Luxton) and I first met at a conference in London, I
bought her a beer in a local pub - Elephant & Castle, January 1988, along
with Allan Dodds and Karen's sister I recall. I have a B&W photograph (as
proof!) with Karen sitting upon a wall, me carrying the beer - a pity you
cannot have attachments -

Point of this? It is a relatively easy task to make a tactile image of that
photograph and put voice and speech into the tactile image, so that Karen
could see it. She may not recognise faces - sometimes no bad thing! - but
she would get scale and relativity of components out of it? How high was
that wall!  The gauntlet is down now Karen - on this one! - I'll post the
photograph on my web site under "NEWS" and a tactile line drawing of it -
done as a tracing because this image is b & w. I'll put sound under it - if
Karen would like to send me a WAV file of her voice saying, "Thanks Don,
next time it is my turn to buy" I'll put that right there to be heard when
one touches her face - on the photo of course! OK, that;s today mapped out!
or maybe tomorrow - but soon. Also, I'll have proof that Karen said she
would buy me a beer! As to the term "Tactaudiograph" - its available for
use!

Any tool - of course
As Kaye says, any drawing tool can be used to make the outlines for capsule
paper output (Flexi-paper or Zytex2) but embosser output is not easily
done - BOTH media are important - the medium can so often be THE message!
Now with Braille fonts easily available - labels can be added. CATS and MICE
seem to be to the fore in this field! Go to it, use whatever you can but
MAKE graphics FUN - it must be so damned hard to read them, yet so
important. John gardners TIGER takes us another step forward - another
option but hopefully one day just one of MANY 'printers for blind users'.
When working at an engineering laboratory in a Japanese University (1998-99)
I was aware of research into inkjet 'instant' raised images and of course
refreshable surfaces - and we tried the latter here in 1991 in which a
membrane, stretched over a honey-comb base of resin cells would rise and
fall in line with a screen image - a simple screen line image or complex
one - all too hard then and very expensive but materials called shape memory
alloys now exist and will no doubt be applied in this area one day.

Custom tools
Custom tools exist in TGD QikTac and TGD TraceMe, both are wrapped in TGD
Pro for making either embosser output directly from a traced drawing or for
making capsule paper (or thermoform (latter not so good as Hinton and I
found many years ago - for tactile audio structures due to bubbling that
puts the sound out of reach if too much elevation is present)), otherwise
wonderful stuff. For drawing or designing, a mouse will do the trick quickly
and sometimes quite well. A finger or a stylus (or old pencil), however is
much better using a TGD TagPad (Tactile Audio Graphics Pad). ANY picture can
be traced directly into embossed dots at the resolution of the embosser -
Index (3) Enabling (2) and so forth. In TGD colour (even color!)
photographs, diagrams can be 'automatically' transformed to a dot image
using a TraceMe to QikTac procedure. It is not very elegant but it works and
the point here is that when sound and or speech is added to the image and
then read on the same surface - learning and fun are enhanced, in ANY
language. Again TIGER and no doubt the forthcoming TTT will enable pictures
to be made - great. May the prices for ever fall!

CAD - Can't Anyone Draw?
"In the beginning there was silence, then there was Nomad ...." joke, smile,
giggle - no offence meant. Nomad grew out of ATMAPSIT (Audio Tactile Maps
and Spatial Information Tool 1987). Nomad was the commercially developed
version by Quantum Technology Australia (1989). TGD (also called BP (Bumpy
Pictures 1995) followed as I wished to move to a smaller format pad, as was
used in ATMAPSIT - portability and price were reasons for this. A version of
NOAMD as "Mentor" continues to be available. I think it is still DOS. A
problem with the first Nomad was that there was no easy way to make
graphics. Picture Braille was developed in Australia at about this time by
Nigel Herring (1992? also responsible for some Mentor adaptations) and is
still going, now in Windows apparel and that helped. TGD QikTac and TGD Pro
(see www.tactileaudio.com) were developed by us (one and a half people) in
the early nineties to enable QUICK TACTILES to be created AND output
directly to embosser AND capsule paper and NORMAL print paper - the latter
could be used as a Master for puff ink screen printing for instance. These
programs still exist as LISA says, TGD QikTac takes five minutes to learn.
Thanks to Lisa's recent testing we have ironed out some embosser problems -
they are all so different and I only have one - on loan! FREE 21 day trials
of QikTac with full functionality except 'save' and full page embossing, can
be Downloaded from the web site.

A version of QikTac called TGD AudioCAD (Can't Anyone Draw?) was also
produced (1994/5) - this enabled blind people to create drawings that had
geometric integrity - a circle was a circle - no problem - it worked, as
friends at a CNIB workshop in Ottawa in 1999 will testify (and elsewhere).
It has been withdrawn for a couple of years as we are now programming to
control drawing functionality with speech commands - onto the TagPad again.
It will be available FREE to all TGD Workshop toolkit owners. It will be
ready in a couple of months for testing along with another tactile audio
system for O&M traing and pleasure, TGD AudioTRIP. Output for AudioCAD is to
embosser and capsule paper (flexi-paper is my favourite due to its water
resistence and strength and it can be scrunched into a schoolboy's pocket!)
but also enables normal print so that a blind person's computer drawings
(perfect circles - see British Journal of Vision Impairment 1998) can be
used by a sighted person - Braille is automatically converted to print. I'll
put a picture on the TGD site - at www.tactileaudio.com/news.htm drawn by a
blind friend in Buenos Aires, perhaps the first such drawing, circa 1996. We
write about this and show the output in World Blind (1997). Now - the same
picture can then be put onto / into the Tactile audio environment - by the
blind creator - and labelled in sound and explantion - IT IS NOT EASY - BUT
IT IS POSSIBLE as Monica once said.

Standardization
The meeting in London (above), 1988, Tactual and Bold Print Mapping
Commission of the Interantional Cartographics Association discussed the
matter of standardization of symbols. Naturally enough - but when audio is
added - the NECCESSITY for 'shape' to be 'accurately reproduced ACROSS
'maps' becomes less important because the finger is now focussing (sic!) on
relationships that build structure - the speech or sound (we painted pure
tone frequencies into areas) interprets the shape - "church", "mosque",
"synagogue" (how would you differentiate them in standardized tactile mode
alone -).
Of course there are 'better' 'worse' designs and the TagPad tactile audio
environment is not always 'at hand' - images FIRST studied on the TagPad (or
whatever) should then be enjoyed and be legible (at least in large measure)
away from the 'light' so to speak. Speaking of light, an enbaling tool for
many ...

Little story
Years ago while still working at a University I put it to the Council
(indeed to the Chancellor) that the library was discriminating against blind
students. "Oh and why is that?" "Well madam (she was a judge!) they are
having to pay for the lighting bill and they don't need the lights". "I
see", she replied. "No madam you do not see in the dark, you cannot read any
of the books either, in the dark. The problem is that our blind student(s)
can read in the dark - but they have no books to read". "Does not the blind
society provide them?" " Well, it does its best in Braille - but there must
be over a million books here!" "Get to the point Parkes". "The point is that
buying a Kurtweill reader (199 early) will let hem read most of those books,
and you can turn out the lights". The machine was bought and the lights
stayed on, everyone benefitted and the judge learnt something too!

Concluding
I avoided connection to this wonderful facility that Lisa has enabled, for
some time, because I do have a particular barrow to push - and naturally I
am going to ALWAYS encourage the tactile audio medium - until a few days ago
I was only aware of one such system. It all came as a bit of a shock - but
with fair play - blind and low vision and as I have always hoped, all
special needs can share the widest possible range of tactile audio
approaches. In fact, main stream children in K should love it too - its the
tactile bit there - they all read with their fingers as any parent will
testify! various Touch Pad overlays have been used for years - IntelliKeys,
Edmark and more - I now always think of it as tactile audio, ie the tactile
first - because it is the sensory substitution of touch that initiates the
audio that creates the picture that every blind person can have in mind as
Nemeth once wrote, or words to that effect.

I'll upload the Tactaudiograph or idea of it in a day or two. Perhaps I can
get someone to do a roll over for me - send a wav file Karen and pax -

Don Parkes


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lisa Yayla" <fnugg@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 5:09 AM
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Tactile Graphics Options


> Hi Kaye,
> Opps, I'm a bit embarrassed now. I should of course known
> what CAT stands for because Linda had sent me a copy of
> your manual, over a year ago. It was an eye opener at the
> time. It is
> very well written and an excellent guide.
> I have just had a quick look at the PowerPoint slides.
> Fabulous. They are so clearly written and layout very
> clear. Large pictures showing where to click and etc.
> The Perky CATs is really interesting!
> Very well explained. Wonderful for people that are
> computer wary. I once showed a person who had the
> "hibby jibbies" for computers how to use QikTac, and
> it took them about 5 minutes to learn it. I think your
> manual
> is in the same line, very user friendly.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Lisa
>
>
> Kaye Travnicek wrote:
> >
> > Hi Lisa!
> >
> > Pete, my partner, Linda Horton, and I are the CATs people!  CATs is the
> > acronym for Computer Assisted Tactiles.  Pete is in Florida; Linda is
now
> > in Arizona; and I am in Nebraska.  We are using the drawing component of
> > Microsoft Word to execute drawings for output from a Tiger embosser or a
> > thermal enhancement device, e.g., the Tactile Image Enhancer (T.I.E.),
> > PIAF, etc.  Nearly all transcribers have MS Word installed in their
> > computers so it is a readily available tool for most.  Pete conducts the
> > same kind of workshops with his volunteer groups in Florida.  I have
> > prepared a series of PowerPoint shows with reference to how we teach our
> > NBA workshop participants the steps involved in producing tactile
graphics
> > using this method.  I am sending these to you, Lisa, as attachments to
> > your private e-mail address.  Feel free to share them in any way you
wish.
> >  The PP shows are a visual supplement to our more extensive print
manual.
> >
> > SAT--it has a ring to it!  The only confusion might arise from the fact
> > that SAT also stands for Standard Achievement Test and the letters SAT
are
> > bandied about constantly in the educational setting.
> >
> > I am so encouraged by your willingness to at least consider such an "off
> > the wall" idea.  It would take some doing, but why not start to think
> > about it.  As another example of quicker delivery, at our last workshop
we
> > encouraged our participants to submit, electronically, simple outline
> > drawings to View Plus, the designer and producer of the Tiger embosser.
> > They graciously agreed to help us with an experiment to expedite the
> > drawing of repetitious lines and grids and perhaps map outlines by
> > embossing these drawings created with CATs.  Then, when these were
> > returned to the transcriber, they would further enhance them with point
> > symbol objects and label (although the Tiger could very simply do
this--we
> > wanted to keep it very basic up front).  Finally, the transcriber could
> > send the masters off to the thermoform machine for duplication and
> > inclusion in textbooks.  We asked that the hard copy be returned to the
> > transcriber FREE MAIL to see how long it took the drawings to return to
> > them.  I hope that some of them leaped on this opportunity but I have
not
> > received any reports on this yet.  I may end up using myself as the
> > "Guinea pig" in this experiment.  I remain zealous in the quest for
> > finding ways to expedite the delivery of quality tactile graphics. -- kt
> >
> > accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> > >Hi Kaye,
> > >I liked your idea about making sound and touch the norm!
> > >Is there an acronym for this combination of medium?
> > >What about SAT? Or is that dumb?
> > >
> > >Hi Pete,
> > >What is CAT?
> > >
> > >Regards,
> > >Lisa
> > >
> > >
> > >Lisa Yayla
> > >Huseby Kompetansesenter
> > >Oslo Norway
> > >lisa.yayla@xxxxxxxxxx
> > >
> > >
>
>

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