[accessibleimage] photography and the blind

Hi. listers!

As you know, I've been doing photography with blind and low-vision students for the past two years.

To date, all of my experiments with tactile graphics have been done with solarplate - wonderful stuff (relatively easy to use, non-toxic and accessible to some l-v students who can use computers to make their negatives. It also gives them some sense of the working process of a regular black & white photo lab.

Recently, I started putting photographic images onto Swell Touch paper (vendor: American Thermoform.)

It's much cheaper ($1 compared to $5-6 for solarplate) and faster. Less monkeying around trying to get good exposures. One downside is the need for a fuser.

For those unfamiliar with swell paper, you can feed this through a regular photocopier or laser printer to lay down the image. The paper is them fed into a fuser which bubbles up the plastic coating. I'm not an expert at tactile graphics and others might correct me, I've mostly seen this paper used to make maps and graphs.

My process:
Much of my own photography is done on film. I scan my negatives and work with them in PhotoShop. Finished images can be printed out on a laser printer on this swell paper. I sometimes use a digital camera to eliminate the processing steps, but the image is still brought into PhotoShop for adjustment. (When I'm creating images for blind and L-V viewers, I convert to black & white and get rid of much of the detail leaving only highlights.) You can also decide which areas are done in relief and which are flat by shifting between printing the positive image and printing the negative onto the swell paper.

I call my images "faux-toe-graphs"

I am interested to have others use this process and give me feedback. I envision it as a useful tool in teaching concepts of visual art such as texture, balance, composition, etc. It might be just plain fun for a blind kid to have a faux-toe-graph of his dog. (By the way, these are also accessible to visually-abled viewers.)

In case you're wondering, I have not recently bought stock in American Thermoform, not am I part of their sales team. Though, hmmm... I might have a couple of calls to make on Monday.... (just kidding!)

Cheers,
Barry




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