That is a great question.
In some contexts, I think the tactile graphics are extremely helpful. In other ways they are too abstract or detailed to the point where they are too hard to understand. I would say sometimes, simple is better.
I can see how graphs and charts can be helpful. Just looking through the Tactile Graphics Library, I found that some of the graphics were hard to picture without knowing what the graphic represented. And other graphics gave me a better understanding of the object or thing being displayed. I did like being able to follow a line graph or bar chart. Also, panning around the graphic made me think of the days when I used a CCTV to enlarge my schoolwork having to put the sections together in my head to get the entire picture.
I can also see how this could benefit a student. Teaching a student how to read a graph or chart at an early age would benefit them even more when they get older. This skill can transfer to other skills in life.
I am a totally blind person who hasnāt had a lot of exposure to tactile graphics. I really appreciated the layout of the front edge of the keyboard in the tutorial. Some maps have made sense to me, such as ones at ACB and NDB conventions of exhibit halls.
The scroll bars were a new thing for me to experience, as well as zooming in and out of a tactile graphic. I decided that since I currently have two cats and have raised others, Iād find a tactile graphic of a cat. It didnāt even feel like I would imagine. I thought maybe I could find the catās ears, but Iām just not sure. Anyway, since itās a 2d graphic, I suppose only one side of the cat might be drawn? Iāll try to look some more at it this weekend and see what I can come up with.
I hope Iām not the only one who feels lost at this stage.
I explored several tactile images such as a chess board, chess pieces, and the map of the United States. I used both the panning and zoom features, It was amazing to view the map at different levels of detail, and seeing the braille state initials appear within the state borders. This was my first experience with tactile graphics of this type and Iām definitely hooked.
I explored a mandala in the art section. The shortcuts to move to the center, top right etc were very helpful. I also showed fewer details which made the graphic easier to understand. Visually more details usually add to the experience and understanding but often when experiencing things tactilely, the opposite is true. Graphs and charts will help my students the most in school, and in their chosen career paths. It may be challenging to get the best set up for each graphic such as more or less detail, zoom in or out, as well as how do they all work best together. Iām sure practicing with familiar graphics will be a great place to start.
I chose the Ring of Fire map under Social Studies. The map first appears in a small format to give the student an overview of its vast areas. I initially used the zoom-in key, followed by the D-pads, to explore all of its borders. If a student already knows where they would like to go on the map, they can use the point-and-click feature instead.
Yes, you have to zoom in to understand the map lines and their representations. This map displays a 2D world map, with the Ring of Fire represented by dotted lines that indicate its location. These dots are distinct in both their appearance and tactile feel.
I see tactile graphics as a powerful way to give my students or clients immediate, hands-on access to information in real time. Whether weāre looking at a shared document, working with Excel for finance, or exploring bar graphs in a science class or during a workplace meeting, tactile graphics allow them to take in all the information at once. For example, one of my students who is preparing to head off to college is learning to use tactile graphics to read complex charts and graphs independently. This skill will allow them to participate fully in group projects, analyze lab results in science courses, and follow along with data shared in classāwithout having to wait for separate accommodations. It not only makes the content more accessible, but also builds confidence and independence in navigating digital tools and interpreting dataāskills that are essential for success in both academic and workplace settings.
One challenge I anticipate when teaching students or clients to use the Tactile Viewer is that individuals with little or no tactile navigation experience may first need baseline instruction. This includes developing spatial awareness and building a concrete understanding of what the tactile display is representing. Without these foundational skills, the viewerās information may feel abstract or confusing. To address this, I would begin with structured tactile exploration activities, starting with simple, familiar layouts and gradually moving to more complex graphics. I would also provide guided practice and real-world examples to help learners make meaningful connections between the tactile display and the actual concept or environment it represents.
Mary, I really appreciate your feedback. Regarding the scroll bars, I find them very helpful in giving the viewer a sense of where they are within the graphic. As for understanding what the graphic represents, that can be challenging. I believe all tactile graphics can be difficult for anyone when trying to interpret a 2D image through touch initially. I think that, given time and experience with graphics presented this way, users will better understand their representation.
I think you really hit on a key point. Graphics often make sense because we already have a preconceived idea in our minds. When that isnāt there, the learner has to create it from scratch. Paper graphics can also be a problem for many people, but digital graphics add an additional level of complexity. I believe the best approach is to start with smaller, simpler representations and gradually build from there. I think one of the nice things about this cohort is to really explore shared experiences to provide meaningful grapgics.
I explored a butterfly life cycle. Exploring by sections seemed to work the best for me. Using the Zoom In or Out buttons made details easier to decode and then navigation to continue. This will be a remarkable tool to have students touch science concepts in real time. One challenge I anticipate is when a graphic is very detailed, the student may have difficulty distinguishing each feature.
I have really not worked much with tactile graphics. This is a new experience for me. I did not know what to expect going into the lesson.
I could see this being use full in some classes, such as: Global Issues (Student of the early 2000ās, this class probably has a different name by now). I played around with the map of the United States. I found it fascinating that the states name/abbreviation was in braille, as the state borders were all raised line.
At this point tactile graphics are tough for me, I did find zooming in helped a bit, but only if I had a mental image of what I was trying to feel for the graphic.
Tactile viewer was one of the first applications that I used when I first started using the Monarch. Having looked a lot of embossed tactile graphics before, one of the features I loved the most about Tactile viewer that you cannot get on embossed tactile graphics without wasting a lot of paper is its capability to zoom into and out of a tactile graphics. This is actually very useful in helping me figure out what things must look like from far away; their shapes, as well as what sighted people must see with relation to their details from a distance. However, I also loved being able to zoom in whenever I wanted to as well, so that I can get the full detail of a picture. Being able to move around a picture and center a picture was also something I found to be incredibly useful.
I spent a lot of time looking at maps, and I ended up learning a lot about the locations of specific states and regions within the United States for example, that I did not know as well before. For example, I had no idea that Illinois did not technically border Michigan, except via a water boundary, which to me was pretty crazy, because I have made numerous trips from Michigan to Chicago and never across water. So I use to just think that I was going right from Michigan into Illinois. I truly look forward to seeing what more I can learn as I continue to explore more graphics.
I can think of a lot of ways to use this for my students. I have often thought of how to explain what a specific thing that I have seen in the past might look like to a student, and the Monarch will be the best way to show off something like this. Especially with the new Monarch Wing It app which I can use to just draw the picture I was imagining. However, if we were to go deeper into this and use Tactile Viewer only specifically, I have had a lot of students who were interested in the concept of space and exploration. Being able to show them something like what a constellation looks like so that they can conceptualize it in their mind is amazing and something we would not have had at our fingertips before without doing a lot of research and finding the necessary tactile graphics to emboss.
Tactile graphics used: I first chose the images of the school Bus and Cruise ship because I figured those would be solid shapes and therefore easier to identify after zooming in. . I also used the backhoe shaded and the bicycle images because they have lots of space in them and I knew it would not be very easy to identify their parts after zooming in. I used the Zoom in and out keys as well as the 4D pads.
Zoom in and out: I found that I had to spend some time Zooming in and out to establish my orientation. I also wanted to understand of how much the zoom level changes my prospective. I had to keep reminding myself that not only do pictures get bigger, but new detail may also be added. Sometimes that new detail can feel like there is extra clutter on the display. That is when I realized that keeping prospective really matters, otherwise you can get lost in the graphic. For me the opposite is also true. With images with a lot of space in them, you can get lost in all the space. For example, the bicycle is just wheels and a frame. I wanted to see if I could keep my prospective as I panned through the zoomed-in image So I started using the 4D pads to get a sense of how many key presses it takes to move around a picture once it has been zoomed-in. This exercise helps me to remember to pan vertically, because up until this point, panning for me has only meant left and right not up and down as well.
How I would envision using tactile graphics to support students in an employment setting: I envision using the monarch to help demystify spreadsheets for other blind and low vision people. I feel that being able to show someone a grid all at once can help to understand how cells are related to the entire grid instead of hearing about one cell at a time.
Challenges teaching students about the tactile viewer: I anticipate that it will be challenging for some to learn how to reconcile 2 different views for the same image. I am not sure yet of how I would teach someone to overcome this challenge. However, I would start by finding 2 graphics that are closer to each other in size using braille paper. I might also find a tactile graphic that fills a braille page and then use a smaller piece of paper with a square window cut out of the center to show how when you zoom in, you then can only view a portion of the original graphic.
Tactile graphics comparison between embossed and digital tactile viewer: The biggest thing for me is that I have learned over a lot of time reading braille that I know how much pressure to put on the braille so that I can read everything, but my fingers still glide on the paper smoothly with no friction. I am just used to it. I feel that when viewing tactile graphics, I want the surface to allow my fingers to glide smoothly as well because I am looking for detail which can be randomly placed on the page. As opposed to sentences which have words which are aligned with each other.
Hello. I am totally blind and know I would be a visual learner, even though Iāve never seen. What is exciting to me about the Monarch is the chance to explore tactile graphics. Having another way to explore the world is awesome.
One of the first graphics I explored was a baseball diamond. Iām a fan of our local collegiate team and so I loved knowing where the various parts of the field are, and that the bases are oriented counter-clockwise, if I remember correctly. I also felt the baseball helmet image. At first, I needed to decipher the view as a side view. A friend who was watching me exploring the image brought over his cap that had a brim and placed it in my hands with the brim to the right. then, I knew this was a side view. Itās really cool that you can rotate the image with R plus Spacebar. I think, as others have said, itās important to start out with simple images and work up to more coplex ones. Having a physical representation to hold and manipulate (as in the baseball helmet) is an important teaching aid.
I explored the map of the US as well as many musical instruments. It was very interesting how you could zoom in and out, and then navigate the image. I will look forward to exploring this more with my students who are visually impaired.
Four way stop
Didnāt change any understanding of course zooming out made it less useful. but it was a good one to have on hand for my Veterans as a mobility specialist.
Been using WingIt for on the fly but having a library might make it faster.
Since all the Veterans I work with are adventitiously blind donāt see any problems since they have visual concepts
I am intrigued by tactile graphics; at the same time, I donāt believe Iām extremely good with navigating and understanding them. I looked at multiple graphics, sports graphics like a baseball field and a basketball court, and some of the moon graphics, all things I have some familiarity with. The good and bad about zooming is that Iām still having some trouble remembering the full extent/shape of the graphic. I can pick up details but not always the bigger picture, namely due to a lack of tactile graphics training in the past. I still enjoy looking at them, and, in my case, nothing short of solid training will fix the problem. Still, it has been a positive experience.
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- I examined the Pedigree Chart on the APH TGIL. Pedigrees are a type of chart that show how a genetic trait is inherited. Pedigrees are arranged in a family tree-type structure, where parents are connected to children by vertical lines and spouses are connected by horizontal lines. To examine this graph, I first zoomed in with the + key. I initially wasnāt sure which symbols this chart used for males and females, so I next moved to the top of the chart where there is a key with information about the symbols used in the chart. I moved to the top of the chart by zooming back out with the - key and then using point and click at the top of the chart. This allowed me to read the braille text in the key that showed that males with the trait were a filled-in square, males without the trait were an open square, females with the trait were a filled in circle (pseudo-circle because the Monarch canāt quite do perfect circles), and females without the trait were open cir4cles. I then used the down arrow key to move back down to the chart and investigated it.
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- For this chart, I was only able to make out any detail when zoomed in. The zoomed out view was too coarse-grained. Similarly, the braille text was only legible when zoomed in. When zoomed out, I was able to tell that there was something above the main pedigree chart, which turned out to be the chart key. This particular chart only had two available zoom settings. It would have been useful to have some intermediate levels of zoom because only a portion of the pedigree fit on the page at once when zoomed in, making it difficult to efficiently examine the chart.
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- I think the Monarch has the potential to help those seeking employment in data analysis and related research fields by allowing individuals to get a better udnerstanding of what certain charts look like. Even if an individual canāt interact with every chart in their work setting, knowing what those charts are supposed to look like and what things to look for in those charts can greatly help individuals succeed in a work place. I will refer to this a chart literacy. Chart literacy allows blind individuals to discuss data with colleagues and to know what to ask about a graph, even if they donāt have a representation of it. The Monarch can help individuals examine various types of graphs to learn this literacy. However, I think the limited resolution of the Monarch makes it difficult to view certain types of graphs. For example, graphs with hundreds or thousands of data points, which are very common in data analysis today, would be hard to examine on the Monarch. However, if a blind individual has examined several similar graphs with smaller data points and has developed chart literacy, then they will know what to ask about a chart or to use other tools, like programming or data sonification to explore the dataset. Therefore, I see the Monarch as a companion tool alongside data sonification, statistical programming, summary statistics, and sighted assistance.
- 4. I think the biggest challenge in teaching others to use the tactile viewer is the resolution of the Monarch. Some shapes, such as circles, and graphs with many datapoints cannot be rendered in precise detail. The controls on the tactile viewer are generally very intuitive. However, it is a bit difficult to get a good picture of a chart when there are only two zoom levels. Some charts do have more than two zoom levels. Iām not sure how the zoom levels of a graph are determined; do they have to specified by the person making the chart? When there are only two settings, I have found the zoomed out view to be too coarse and the zoomed in view to be so zoomed in that you have to arrow around a lot to view the graph. It is also hard to keep track of where you are in a graph when you are zoomed in and have to keep moving around with arrows.
Optional Extension: I used physical tactile graphics a lot when I was in middle and high school. The quality of tactile graphics depends heavily on who makes them. I generally find tactile graphics made by a skilled professional to be better than the graphics on the Monarch because more detail can be added and the graphics can be put on folding paper so that you can unfold them to get a very big diagram. However, these types of high-quality physical graphics are very hard to come by. The Monarch has the edge on the quantity of graphics available.
- I explored the Eiffel Tower alongside a student who has been in Paris before. I have not been there, and we talked about how the tactile graphic of the tower gave me a visual representation of how it is depicted.
- Zooming in and out helped me and the student explore the tower in detail. He was able to recall and share details that were not represented in the tactile graphic; and his input enriched the graphic.
- I envision the tactile graphics to be supplement to information. The image cannot stand alone, and the information provided in text can be detailed in a graphic.
- I did an activity with a student in which they explored tactile images without knowing the title. This was quite challenging; once I gave them the name of the image, they recognized what they were exploring. With experience, they gained fluency in recognizing tactile graphics.
- The students I worked with have experienced graphics on math and geographic textbooks, and they all mentioned that those graphics were much more detailed with textures. The monarch offers a basic silhouette that is limited on the details it can provide.
I started simply and explored science graphics with an emphasis on animals, which turned out to be a huge category. I appreciated the follow-up reply about exploring various quadrants of the image. Iāll use this for more complex images! Zooming in and out often helped to get an idea of the animal graphics from different perspectives.
Making the graphic larger provided more detail, while making it smaller gave more of a āwhole pictureā understanding. As someone who is congenetally blind and who has a somewhat limited graphic exposure, especially in recent history, Iām still adjusting to sometimes not having both those experiences at the same time. I teach one student who is blind along with my full-time job in accessibility. He is also part of the Monarch student pilot program, so he has access to his own. Now that Iāve experienced the graphics myself, it became much easier for me to show him the different benefits of the larger view versus the smaller one.
First Impressions: What I explored and how
I explored anatomy diagrams in the Tactile Viewer and used pan, zoom, level-of-detail toggles, labels, and navigation landmarks. Labeling felt confusing because braille wasnāt attached to features the way it is on embossed graphics, which required extra mental mapping and added cognitive load during exploration.
Detail & Zoom: What helped and what didnāt
Zooming in revealed limited fine detail; some structures lost definition, while zooming out was helpful for understanding overall organization. I missed a visible zoom scale or percentage to stay oriented as I moved in and out, and panning at high zoom was slower than reading a comparable embossed graphic. Two changes that would help are adding a zoom indicator and implementing progressive detail at higher zoom so edges and leader lines remain clear.
CIE Use Cases: How I plan to support students/clients
My priority is real-time viewing of RStudio/ggplot2 graphics on the Monarchāespecially scatter plots, bar charts, and histogramsāto build data literacy for competitive integrated employment. I would also like a way to jump directly to outliers or flagged points so users can quickly interrogate trends, clusters, and anomalies during analysis.
Anticipated Challenges & How Iāll address them
Because digital labels can feel abstract compared to embossed conventions, I plan to start with foundational skills on embossed graphics, then transition to digital with numbered callouts and keyed legends to make label-to-feature mapping explicit. To address orientation without a zoom readout and reduce panning fatigue, I will teach a landmark-plus-overview routine and use bookmarks and zoom anchors for quick navigation. I will also document a repeatable pipeline from R to tactile-ready output with standardized file names and a short SOP, and I will pair tactile navigation with data-driven filtering to find outliers efficiently.
Optional Extension: Digital vs. Embossedāwhen to use which
Embossed graphics provide stronger perceived detail through solid raised lines and varied textures and are typically faster to read for many users; they are especially well suited to precision diagrams like anatomy with high-stakes labeling. The digital viewer excels for high-volume distribution, iterative exploration, and interactive data tasks such as zooming, landmark jumps, and bookmarking. For long-term value, digital production speed needs to substantially outpace PIAF and Tiger workflows.
The Monarch is promising for scalable access to many graphics and for interactive data exploration. To maximize its impact for students and clients in CIE settings, it needs a zoom scale, richer high-zoom detail, clearer labeling conventions, and for the kind of work I doā¦a smooth RStudio-to-Monarch pipeline, plus a rapid method to jump to outliers during analysis.
Describe the tactile graphic you explored. What features did you use to examine the image? The first tactile graphic I explored was on one of an astronaut. It was the front view of an astronaut and the side view of the astronaut that showed the large back pack that they are required to carry.
How did adjusting the level of detail impact your understanding? Did zooming in or out reveal anything surprising?
I used the panning in and out buttons on each side of the Monarch to zoom in and out. I also used the cross arrow up and down to pane up and down on the tactile graphic. I was so surprised to see what I thought was three dots at the top of the graphic was actually the word ā astronaut.ā I was also surprised at the amount of detail that was in the graphic when zooming in and out.
How do you envision using tactile graphics to support students or clients in CIE settings? Consider workplace applications, accessible data representation, and digital literacy. At the university level, I envision using the Monarch to allow students access to graphics, data charts and assist in the great amount of braille reading that will be needed. At the K-12 out reach area, I envision the Monarch as a gateway to all the tactile graphics, math data sheets, and science graphics that is so often cut out of a studentās education because they do not have access to tactile graphics. I have seen time and time again students that come to the college level and have never had the experience of reading a bar graphic or a pie chart because all those problems were omitted from their learning.
What challenges do you anticipate when teaching students or clients to use the Tactile Viewer? How might you address these challenges? I think the largest challenge is going to be teaching students to explore the screen by zooming in and out. So often students see a one page graphic and are not taught to explore the graphic. The issue will be teaching them there is more information once you zoom in or pane around the screen.