Tactile Book for Visually Impaired

To be forth right I got inspiration and exposure to the world of visually impaired through the movie called “Black” which I saw during my graduation days in 2005. Only after I saw the film Black, that I became acutely aware of the visually impaired. Until then I had hardly ever thought about them except to feel deep sympathy. As I was training to be a painter I began to paint images that I thought may be how the world appeared to them. My teacher Dr. Ajay Jaitly inquired why I had so much black in my paintings. When I told him about my concerns he pointed out my absolute ignorance and the fact that I had not even met one person with that condition. I was simply jumping to conclusions without even finding out anything about them. This set me thinking and more curious and inquisitive about so many questions regarding their world and I decided to find out more. I wanted to know and experience this new world. I thought this will be the best time to get the answers to all the questions through this project.

Before I would meet with them I thought I would do my homework by reading whatever literature was available about their perception of the world. I started by reading. Having read about, I felt it was time to go meet them. After meeting with them, the initial objective was to learn how to make pictures that can be seen by fingers. This was followed with some experiments. Finally the project emerged as a book with illustrations which were tested. Personally I have learned a lot and my understanding has acquired depth that my initial emotions could not comprehend.

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Step by step process
The images show the steps in which the pictures were made.

 

 

That’s the final image. Following are the experiments done by making the same picture in four different ways. The pictures differ in their details. This experiment was done to understand to what extent can our hands recognize details. The selection of the texture for each creature was done accordingly. Later all these material and drawings were given to the visually impaired children for getting the feedback. In the following image, the last illustration was approved by the kids. They demanded little stylization too. But it was not that easy for every drawing. Kids were well acquainted with fish due to the simplicity in its form. But in case of other creatures the case was different. It was very difficult to distinguish other animals tactily as all of them had tails, all of them had legs!

One interesting fact I remember while I was carrying out these experiment that, there were partially sighted kids too in the same school. So they complained me for not coloring these images.

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~ by deeptihalder on June 2, 2009.