Hi, everyone! Actually, my experiences with tactile images, some of them
anyway, have been positive ones.
When I was little, in the library of the school for the blind I attended, we
had a couple of Snoopy books with tactile illustrations. I would sit and
read them and "look" at those illustrations for hours! <Smile> And I'll
never forget the day a teacher handed me a "picture" that I could actually
color, a line drawing of an Easter bunny that she had made by gluing string
onto paper and then running it through a Thermoform machine. I think I may
have a touch of the flu today, so I'm not even gonna try to explain what a
Thermoform machine is! <LOL> Cindy, it's basically a Braille copy machine.
<Smile>
Anyway, while I have found some tactile graphics to be easier to understand
than others, I definitely think they have their place. Of course, I enjoy
descriptions, too. Take care!
Jana
Hi Cindy,
Most pictures really can't be made into meaningful tactile images. If you've
never had vision, it is really difficult to look at the outline of
something, sometimes even of a familiar object, and have that outline help
you understand anything about the thing being drawn. Often when I was
examining a tactile image I couldn't understand it, even if I knew exactly
what it was supposed to be. And pictures with multiple objects or people or
creatures or whatever would be incomprehensible chaos. The only thing that
works are outlines, and those aren't meaningful most of the time. For
example, I might be able to tell that an outline represented a person, but
it would be like looking at a stick man is for a sighted person. It wouldn't
tell me anything about the person. Those outlines work well for maps and
charts and graphs, which I can interpret fairly easily when they're well
designed. But when it comes to pictures, especially if they're entertaining,
the only way for me to enjoy them is to have them described for me. My mom
and some sighted friends enjoy describing cartoons when they find them
funny, and I get the point about 99% of the time, and I can often understand
and enjoy the funny aspects of the picture even though I can't actually
visualize it in my mind.
I had some of those Twin Vision books, but they didn't contain any tactile
graphics. They just had the text in print and in braille.
Kellie
