Express Activity 2: Tactile Viewer

Expanded Core Curriculum Mastering the Monarch
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Now that you have explored the Tactile Viewer reflect on its impact and share your insights in a discussion post.

Discussion Prompt

  1. Describe the tactile graphic you explored. What features did you use to examine the image?

  2. How did adjusting the level of detail impact your understanding? Did zooming in or out reveal anything surprising?

  3. How do you envision using tactile graphics to support students or clients in CIE settings? Consider workplace applications, accessible data representation, and digital literacy.

  4. What challenges do you anticipate when teaching students or clients to use the Tactile Viewer? How might you address these challenges?

Optional Extension

If you have used embossed tactile graphics before, how does the digital Tactile Viewer experience compare? Which method do you think would be most effective in different settings?

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Tactile Graphic Exploration

I explored the maps of Australia found in the TGIL. As an Australian citizen who was educated in Australia, I am somewhat familiar with basic facts of Australian geography.

I used the zoom in/out commands to explore the maps in detail and to access the braille labels. I also found the commands that moved to specific locations on the image (top left, bottom left, top center, etc.) to be valuable when an image had been expanded and no longer fit as a whole on the display. These commands are documented in the User Guide and appear in the context menu, but have not been included in the training module.

When I previously had an opportunity to interact with the graphics viewer on a Monarch, I noticed that some diagrams such as bar charts didnā€™t fit vertically on the display when zoomed in. I think the rotate command would be useful here, allowing the user to switch to landscape orientation so that, for example, the bars of a bar chart are shown horizontally rather than vertically.

Adjusting the Level of Detail

This is often a necessity. In the default image size, most of the details are hidden, but a good overview of the entire graphic is provided - a useful starting point in my opinion. Zooming in allowed me to read the braille labels and to find boundaries on the Australian territories map.

Using Tactile Graphics to Supports Students and Professionals

I donā€™t work in blindness services. However, I have participated in graphics-related accessibility research and related projects, and I can respond from this perspective. I think there are more questions than answers, as the Monarch creates possibilities that havenā€™t been previously investigated owing to the lack of graphics-capable tactile displays out in the field in the hands of users. There are two aspects: students and professionals as readers of graphics, and as creators of graphical content.

Graphics Interpretation

The Monarch allows for almost instant creation of tactile graphics. However, to make sense of an image presented in a publication, presentation, Web page or other source found in higher education or in a professional context, it may need transformation to ensure that the image is intelligible as a tactile graphic. There are research questions here. Is transforming an image to make it more intelligible and to provide braille labels a problem that could be solved sufficiently well by creating or adapting machine learning models? Would it be useful to equip visual interpretation services such as AIRA or Be My Eyes with the ability to create or edit images and then transmit them to a Monarch?

The Monarch enables tactile graphics to be manipulated quickly and easily, raising the research question of what strategies of reading and exploration are most effective for different tasks. In addition, would it be useful to develop an interactive tactile graphics tutorial based on insights from cognitive science - an intelligent tutoring system - to help students to enhance their tactile graphics interpretation skills, as a supplement to the work of teachers?

Graphics Creation

Students and professionals, especially in graphics-intensive disciplines, are likely to encounter the challenge of creating visually effective graphics for inclusion in publications, presentations, academic assignments or other work. Examples of such graphics include graphs, charts and diagrams. The Monarch could support graphics preparation by allowing the resulting images to be read and explored during or after creation. There is the potential to develop accessible vector graphics editing tools that make use of a tactile display. Also, could software that produces graphics automatically be configured or adapted to generate intelligible tactile graphics, including braille labels?

For example, in the peer review process for a book chapter that I wrote, I was asked to add diagrams depicting the relationships among the main ideas under discussion. This was an interesting challenge for me as a totally blind person. I used GraphViz to create the diagrams, learning from documentation found on the Web. I needed to rely on helpful colleagues to check the graphical output so I could make improvements. I think the Monarch could make this task easier. There are other, similar tools such as TikZ used in academic and research contexts that could prove useful in creating graphics independently.

Challenges

I have addressed a range of challenges in the preceding comments. To summarize:

  • Developing effective graphics interpretation and exploration strategies,
  • Developing or adapting software for graphics creation tasks, and
  • Converting graphics via an automated process or human intervention from publications or other sources found in higehr education and the professions.

I think the solutions are a combination of effective education in tactile graphics, research, and innovative software projects taking advantage of tactile displays.

Comparison with Embossed and Other Tactile Graphics

I think the main differences are clear: graphics on the Monarch are smaller and of lower resolution than those produced by embossers, raised line drawing kits and other conventional techniques. However, graphics on the Monarch can be manipulated in real time, enabling details to be disclosed and hidden in ways that are impossible in static formats such as embossed graphics.

It is also interesting to compare graphics on the Monarch with the capabilities of other multiline braille and tactile displays. I think the uniform distance between pins in both dimensions on the Monarch is a significant advantage in displaying tactile graphics. Some multiline displays can only represent standard braille cells, with their wider inter-cell spacing, requiring tactile graphics to be composed of braille instead of being built from an array of equally spaced dots. The Monarch offers higher resolution than, for example, the Graphiti display, but without supporting multiple pin heights. A further advantage of the Monarch is that it can present very readable braille as well as tactile graphics using the same pin array.

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I have really enjoyed playing with the Tactile Viewer. Since I have very little experience with tactile graphics, I was excited to look at what the TGIL had to offer. I looked at many images that interested me, but at first tried finding things that I knew would be familiar. The first thing I search for was DNA, as DNA and genetics is relevant to my work. I do know what a double helix looks like and I found that looking at a 2D model of it was just not as striking to me as a 3d model. However, I did like being able to pan and scroll. For the first several images, I just zoomed and panned around. After reading othersā€™ comments, I then realized I could use keyboard shortcuts to get to different parts of the image which now I feel is very helpful. It wouldā€™ve been nice to be reminded of this while going through the training. I am finding that reading the manual is not as helpful as other assistive technology devices have been. Usually I really enjoy reading the manual, but this user guide leaves a lot of details out. Anyway, I did also look at a pedigree chart which I was delighted to discover was in the TGIL. This is a visual representation of a family structure and genetic counselors draw these when we see patients. I know abstractly what they look like but having it represented in a tactile way was both interesting and very confusing. I found it hard to trace the line from parents to children and had to think carefully about where I was scrolling and panning. I am finding that I sometimes wish there were two zoom levels, instead of a very zoomed out version and a very zoomed in version. Itā€™d be nice if there was something in the middle. Some images display very well on the monarch and others donā€™t. Only toward the end of my exploration time did I think to look at keyboard shortcuts and found that I could gather file information with I and space which had very helpful information about whether the image would display well on a monarch in the production notes. Since I was not taught with many tactile graphics, other than a few graphs in math, I find it hard to know what I am looking at and often ask my sighted husband to help give me some context. Perhaps for students who are learning this in their younger years, this would not be a problem but itā€™s a challenge for me. I have not tried looking at charts and tables yet and wonder how easy that would be to read. One other thing I wish I had known earlier on was that you could choose to set it so that the scroll bars are not shown. By doing this, you can get that much more area of the screen to show images. Having those scroll bars is good as a beginner, but I think it should be highlighted so that if you want to make sure to see as much as possible at a time, you can go and turn those off. I only found it by accident when exploring the menus. Overall, I do hope the TGIL is continually updated because browsing the available images is quite fun.

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I spent a lot of time looking at maps, algebra, statistics and mazes for fun.
I also had several statistics graphics I had gotten prepared for PIAF that I added to the Monarch and compared on the display with the hardcopy I had.
I also have the international phonetic alphabet in a multi-page PDF and had fun exploring that as well.
You can download that from:

you want the file labeled ā€œIPA Braille - Part 2 Tactileā€. Thereā€™s BRF files also to support it on that page.
One of my students needed to individually assemble the phonetic symbols to answer questions on a test so I had a student worker create fridge magnets with symbol so my student could arrange them on the side of a file cabinet to form words. I also gave him these booklets.
Note that the actual tactiles are 28 cells wide whereas the BRF is a standard 40-cel document.
With the tactile viewer I used the zoom in and out and the d-pad.
I personally could not really decipher graphics for anything more complex than a map without help. My sighted husband is an electrical engineer and when he gets some time we are going to look at the graphics for circuits and their schematic symbols. I have written firmware before and I am a ham, so I understand electrical concepts but donā€™t know what the symbols look like.
Responding to the question about how I would envision using tactile graphics: my job is to locate or have tactiles prepared for a student. Then their tutor would work with them, and I would of course show the tutor how to use the monarch. I wonder if I can connect it using HDMI to my VisioDesk so even a low-vision tutor could magnify the display to assist; Iā€™ll have to investigate that soon. But Iā€™m not the professor, so it will be their job or the tutorā€™s job to help the students with graphics, especially for statistics and algebra, and maybe some historical maps.
I know when I used the PIAF to prep some TGIL graphics for a previous statistics class, the professor complained they were too simple, but the student loved them and felt he understood bar and pie charts, histograms and whisker plots much more clearly.
I think a combination of a simple graphic plus an AI or human-created description of a more complex form of that graphic is the way for students to succeed in college-level STEM.
And because any PDF can be opened on the Monarch, itā€™s going to be easy for a tutor with some training to create them with whatever drawing program they prefer. Even scanning a hand-prepared drawing would work if the tutor understands that tactiles need to be radically simplified compared to visual graphics. I know I was able to train to hand-draw on Swell paper with appropriate carbon pens, but he had to learn to make his lines thick enough and wide enough apart.
For me, looking at maps of my state and states I visit was very helpful in learning the geographic relationships of cities to each other. I easily mastered the panning and zooming but often forgot to check the scroll bars to see where I was in the image. Iā€™m really impressed with this especially the point and click zooming and wish I myself had a tutor to get more out of the graphics.
One feature I would like to see is a sound that tells you when youā€™ve panned as far left, right, up and down as you can go on an image. Maybe different timbres for the vertical movement and pitches for the horizontal movement. That is in addition to the scroll bars, since to mee they often look like part of the image.
I think one challenge is that for people like me, who never saw, graphics seem less relevant. For people who used to see, the tactiles might be such a pale image compared to what they used to see that they could become depressed. I have students who used to see, so that will be worth investigating with them.
One thing APH could try is a Hive course for blind people studying at home. They would need to have a monarch, but it could walk them through exploring specific graphics.
Or APH could sell a set of hardcopy instructional graphics for teens and adults along with an audio tutorial. Sell it for under $50 and I bet youā€™d have plenty of takers.
An enterprising TVI could also try creating and selling a self-paced tutorial and earn some extra money. Iā€™d buy it especially if it covered advanced placement and higher ed freshman level tactiles for STEM.
I will be interested in reading what TVIS have to say about using the Monarch to teach exploration of tactiles, especially for teens in middle and high school.

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I noticed there were circuit diagrams in the TGIL. My knowledge of circuits only went as far as secondary school physics class, where analyzing circuit diagrams was essential, so this brings back old memories, but I donā€™t have the expertise to interpret them reliably. For students who donā€™t mind writing code occasionally, some of the tools I mentioned in my earlier comment could be useful in creating circuit diagrams to complete coursework. How difficult would it be to have a vector graphics program generate a diagram which is then intelligible on the Monarch?

APH already has guidelines on creating graphics for the Monarch.

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Iā€™m glad to know I am not the only one who has trouble interpreting tactile graphics, especially since I too have been blind since birth. Maybe our brains work differently from those who used to be able to see. I thought your suggestion of having much simpler tactile graphics to be a great one and I totally agree, when Iā€™m looking at a simple outline of something, it really does help but the more complicated and detailed it is makes it so much harder to interpret and keep in my head. This is especially true when having to pan around because it doesnā€™t all fit on the display. Perhaps having a hard copy may help but I always had trouble with maps too. My sighted husband also had to give me a lot of reference points to help me with more complicated tactile graphics I was looking at but it didnā€™t help for looking at new images I pulled up on my own. Although someone can create graphics in pdf, I do worry that they wonā€™t appear clearly on the monarch because if they are not optimized for viewing in a tactile way, it wonā€™t make sense to a blind person.

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I donā€™t consider myself good at tactile graphics interpretation either. Anything representing a three-dimensional object has always been challenging, and it sometimes became a problem in secondary school mathematics. Iā€™m much better at working with graphs of functions, plane geometric figures, and other, less complicated diagrams.

Also, would it be useful to have the option of zooming in or out by an arbitrary amount, instead of having only a few fixed zoom levels? A command that zooms in just enough for the image to fill the display could also be valuable. The problem is that, although the initial image is small and provides a good overview, as soon as I zoom in, the image often exceeds the size of the display and I have to navigate around it.

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I definitely think that having more than one zoom level would be helpful, especially for beginners learning to figure out what is the best orientation to look at a graphic. At first when exploring, I thought there would be more than one zoom level, more than just zoomed out and zoomed in all the way. Perhaps there could be a setting where someone could set a specific zoom level or maybe just zoom it to fit as best it could on the display. Or perhaps more help in helping someone to figure out what orientation to look at the graphic, like which way to rotate it to get the best view for a beginner might be helpful.
I still find looking at images of 3D objects very confusing and I loaded one of the files tha had basic 3d shapes like cylinder, cone, cube, etc and although I recognize what they lok like, it doesnā€™t always make sense to me why extra lines are placed where they are to show different faces of the shape.

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Like you, I have been blind since birth. I actually could see shapes, although not in 3D. I remember my colors as well.

I would practice with something as simple as a school bus. I saw one in the TGIL. You can practice with the various keystrokes and scrolling. You can see the bus as if you were going to board it. I can also feel the wheels. Was it yellow? Donā€™t know!

Speaking of graphics, I am looking forward to the WingIt app that will be out later. You can learn more about it on the last webinar that was held on v1.2 for the Monarch.

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I agree about the zooming. Iā€™ve had trouble with the statistics scatterplots and graphs that we have because the zoom either requires you to pan around to explore the graph or itā€™s too compress to analyze. Definitely a variable zoom would be useful!
I think if a graphic is designed specifically for the monarch rather than a 11 X 11.5 Braille page that might solve some of this.

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The tactile viewer is extremely cool and I was very impressed by the library. While I do have some sight, itā€™s not enough to actually be able to look at the Braille display of the images and tell what they were, so I did have some fun choosing random movie characters and monuments, taking and sending pictures of them to my husband, and having him guess what they were (he got all of them correct)!
Because Iā€™ve had a Claddagh ring for 15 years and have never been able to clearly distinguish all the elements, I had a lot of fun playing around with this image. The zoom feature and point and click were truly amazing for allowing me to get fine detail on each the crown, heart and hands.
I really think the tactile viewer could be instrumental for students taking history, art history or even architecture courses as it appears to be a great tool for getting fine detail on historical monuments, buildings, and paintings. I think probably the biggest learning curve when teaching students would be illustrating to them the balance for using each the zoom in and push and point features; you do have to use both for graphics with a lot of detail, and you need to practice knowing which to use first and how much to zoom in to not tactily distort the image (I do really like that there is the tactile grid lines when zooming in to let you know where the edge of an image is).
Two challenges Iā€™ve run into thus far using the tactile viewer are:

  1. I tried playing around with the greeting cards section, but I didnā€™t always find that I knew whether I was viewing the front of a card or the inside, and some of the dot representations didnā€™t seem clear to me. I thought using the up and down arrows would allow me to navigate between pages of the card, but this didnā€™t appear to always be the case. I also wanted to play around with saving one of the cards so I could edit and personalize it, but I ran into issues trying to edit the card document.
  2. I actually downloaded an image I had created myself; it was a landscape image of a man in a suit standing on the left with some text on the right. When I tried viewing the image, even when I zoomed in quite a bit, it was very difficult for me to tell what the image was by feel, even though I knew exactly what the image looked like visually. The image just had a mostly plain blue background with a few icons around the boarder, so I didnā€™t think it was going to be too complicated to figure out all the elements tactily, but it was.
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I know little kids will be working with a TVI, but if you are mainstreamed in middle or high school, or an adult, you often donā€™t get that kind of one-on-one attention. It would be nice if APH could also possibly sell a tactile graphics tutorial. It would be audio with accompanying graphics for self-study. The drawings could be hardcopy or they could be images from the TGIL displayed of course on the Monarch. The Monarch could even play the audio, using an app that would help a student explore images, starting from simple shapes and moving towards 3D images.
When my blind students get back in the Fall, I want especially to ask those who could see before to explore some tactiles and give us feedback. That would make an interesting study. I know even students who previously had sight do struggle with the tactiles for statistics, but Iā€™m not sure if it is because it is statistics or it is because the drawings are tactile and they are not used to ā€œviewingā€ drawings by touch.
Our local lighthouse has done a series of in-person trainings focusing on exploring tactile maps of our transit system. It was incredibly fun. A group of us got to take our time exploring each drawing, discussing what we could and could not find, and we worked with a blind and a sighted instructor. This was a training for adults, and we were a mixed group of folks who were always blind or newly blind. People varied in their ability to ā€œprocessā€ the drawings, but it didnā€™t seem to have much to do with whether they had sight before.
By the way the web interface to the TGIL outside of using the monarch seems very confusing to a screen reader user. I wanted to produce a few on my PIAF machine and was struggling to download them. Iā€™m happy to meet with someone from APH on zoom to demo the problem, or I can write up my steps.

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Jason, I think you hit on a pain-point I personally experienced. The native TGIL graphics I really found to be incredible; however, when I tried launching the tactile viewer with a custom image I had created, the experience was vastly different. The fine details were muted, text on the graphic was not translatable, and even though I knew exactly what the visual image looked like, I could not decipher the graphic tactilly. I agree that in order to create more intelligible graphics that there might need to be machine learning intervention, or an intermediary step in graphic creation that translates the visual components of custom images into more easily readable tactile components. As a blind marketer, I see this sort of solution being very pertinent to fields, like graphic design, but even others, like architecture, civil engineering, etc.

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I agree that many of the keyboard short-cuts would be great to include in the initial training tutorials as I did not realize myself at first that you could quickly scan to different quadrants of an image or remove the border indicators to allow for more space for the actual image.

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Here are the guidelines for creating tactile graphics for the Monarch.

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Hi Deborah,
Your post made me start thinking about the ā€˜everydayā€™ applications of the Monarch and how it could enable grater independence even beyond career paths. If there was a way, for instance, for us as BLV individuals to research in real-time a tutorial for how to change a light fixture with all the electrical elements clearly drawn out and labeled with tactile representations, it could be a game-changer for handy-woman work. Iā€™ve never been able to see an electrical, plumming, etc. diagram before and be able to take care of a light or sink replacement on my own, and perhaps the Monarch could enable that sort of independence, too.

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I looked at a few graphics from the TGIL. Some had braille labels, some did not.

I have my wife here who is now totally blind. This happened about three years ago. Denise drove a car in her earlier years, so showing her the map of the US was very interesting. She could feel the shapes of the states and tell where each one was in relation to the others. She could read the atlas and she said this reminded her of that. Being we are as warped as we are, we had to look at Florida. Humorous!

I think once we all get a handle on how to interpret these graphics, it will be easier to show them and teach them to others. I am looking forward to the day when I can see what my iPad or iPhone is showing on social media for example. The weather maps that shows storms and where they are will definitely be interesting to see.

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Iā€™ve supported my student in the pilot program with using the tactile viewer on his Monarch but I hadnā€™t had the chance to try it out myself until now! I found a graphic that showed the life cycle of a frog. The initial image was useful for showing the user that life cycle is a continuous process, as represented by a circle, but little else since there was no discernible detail in the image. When I used the zooming feature, I was able to clearly see each the image of each stage of the life cycle and I could read the braille labels. It seems like a great image to use when teaching a student how zoom in on a graphic.
I think that when the Wing It app is released, it will be great to use with the tactile viewer for creating tactile maps of an office building, college campus, or other areas that a user would need to navigate. Being able to access tactile graphs and charts would be helpful for anyone that has a job requiring the use of visual data or who is taking a college class that uses these kinds of graphics.
I think one of the biggest challenges will be how to help a student accurately interpret a detailed graphic that requires zooming in and a lot of navigation within the zoomed graphic. I would want to make sure they can connect the overall image with the zoomed in details to get a comprehensive understanding of what information is being conveyed. It might be useful to have an embossed version of the overall graphic to reference when looking at the zoomed in version on the Monarch. As a TVI, I would support my student in locating where the zoomed in part is on the embossed image.

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I absolutely agree that different levels of zooming would be amazing! I mentioned in my post that I worry about my students being able to make the connection between the whole zoomed out image and the detailed zoomed in portion of the same image. One of my students took geometry last year, and since there was no textbook for me to get a braille copy of, I had to make A LOT of tactile graphics, and I quickly found that the 3D images were a huge challenge for him. I ended up using either 3D models that I made out of cardstock, or, for more simple shapes like a cube, a 2D graphic that had different textured strips for visible vs. hidden lines. Iā€™m curious, do you think that more exposure and practice with tactile graphics when you were younger would have made it easier for you now?

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Iā€™m a TVI and I have a high school student who is in the student pilot program for the Monarch is quite insecure about his tactile graphics abilities. He does well with handmade graphics that I or his ed tech have created, but he really struggles with commercially produced graphics on that slippery plastic-y kind of paper. He has enjoyed exploring the tactile graphics library on his Monarch, but again, he has varying degrees of success interpreting them. He has been blind since birth so he doesnā€™t have visual memory for reference, and he was in 8th grade when I began working with him, and I donā€™t know how much explicit instruction on interpreting tactile graphics he received when he was younger. I have another high school student who lost her vision when six (sheā€™s now 16), and she also went to a school for the blind in Turkey for years before moving to the US, and she seems to interpret graphics remarkable well. I donā€™t know if itā€™s because of her visual memory, receiving explicit instruction, or both, but she seems to do equally well with paper graphics and those on the Monarch. I have a third braille student (8th grade) who is dual media with a progressive eye condition. I have been trying provide consistent explicit instruction in tactile graphics now so that when sheā€™ll need to rely on her tactile skills, she can do it well. Iā€™m very excited to use the Monarch with her in the fall for this purpose! Iā€™ve found this article to be helpful in explaining the importance of this skill and some ideas for how to teach it: Tactile Graphics ā€“ Paths to Literacy

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