Designing Haptic Graphics for Mathematics: Towards Accessible Math Education for Blind Students

Designing Haptic Graphics for Mathematics: Towards Accessible Math Education for Blind Students

Willemsen, D.R.S.

Wijntjes, M.W.A. (mentor)
Van der Helm, A.J.C. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Master of Science Design for Interaction

2015-05-21

Currently 75% of children with a visual impairment attend regular schools. Schools are digitizing, which poses both advantages as well as threads to the education of students who are blind. With help of VoiceOver or refreshable braille displays, digital textual information has become accessible to the student, however, there is no solution available to make digital graphical content accessible. In this design project haptic technologies are explored to evaluate their ability to communicate graphical aids used in mathematics. Unfortunately, performance of haptic identification with such technologies was poor. It would simply take too long to haptically identify a line drawing, while accuracy would also decrease drastically with increased complexity of the line drawing. Therefore, a new method for creating tactile drawings on the fly has been sought in 3D printing methods. From currently existing additive manufacturing processes, material extrusion seemed best suited to be utilised for create tactile drawings in this context. Printing a tactile graph with the Ultimaker2 has proven to be both faster and possibly at a lower cost than utilising swell-paper to create raised line drawings, a process that is currently used. While there are still several aspects that need to be investigated, utilising 3D printing in the form of material extrusion, seems to hold a lot of potential to create tactile drawings to be used as well as produced by students who are blind; increasing their independence and thereby expanding the availability of learning materials.

haptics
3D printing
blind
mathematics
tactile graphics
multimodal

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b613feb9-7460-49c4-bd93-cc917d84f108

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Willemsen, D.R.S.