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Tactile Graphics
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Navigation: NCTD home > Conference Home > 2000 > Keynote
10th October 2000
At first glance, my credentials as a commentator on tactile maps and diagrams
are highly doubtful. In an attempt to grasp the finer points of trigonometry
I resorted to disposable wire coat hangers and pipe cleaners. Indeed, whenever
I could get my hands on a model or persuade someone to make one, that is exactly
what I did. On the other hand I took part in a fascinating dialogue over two
years with the RNIB in order to produce a working tactile version of Hofstadter's
Godel, Echer and Bach which involved experiments in putting Escher engravings
into tactile form. We managed quite well with simple pieces like "Foreground
and Background" but much of the rest defeated us. What encourages me to speak
now is the narrowing of the gap between the two dimensional presentation and
the three-dimensional model.
As with so many other areas of work with information, new and emerging technologies
are about to take a great deal of the tedium out of accurate and customised
presentation. Let me, then, first of all look at drawing and customisation.
Until recently the skill of the tactile diagram maker has largely lain in collage,
in construction, in deciding what elements of a printed representation to sketch
in. In anything but the simplest two-dimensional printed image the diagram compiler
has to decide how much detail should be included and excluded. There is a balance
to be struck, particularly if the finished product is to be part of a book for
loan where customisation is not contemplated, between tactile sensitivity and
the ability of the brain to hold and relate pieces of information transmitted
to it from the fingers; if a detail is too fine it is lost to the finger, if
too expanded, the brain has difficulty in coping, the dimensions become too
big. Added to this there has always been a problem with accuracy, in many cases
the diagram compiler has had to use manual drawing and cutting to produce as
near as possible a scale equivalent of a printed image.
Now at least much of the tedium can be taken out of the exercise through the
use of computer files of images, maps, diagrams, graphs, which can be manipulated
so that the kind of detail that is left in and out can be altered, together
with the size of elements, without the true scale being altered.
In turn this leads to an ability to customise both in terms of detail and dimensions
while preserving true scale. A congenitally blind person might, for example,
be very good with a highly complex arrangement of straight lines but uncomfortable
with busy, rococo decoration whereas a newly blinded person, familiar with ubiquitous,
ornamental, busy presentations might find less difficulty with this but might
not grasp the formal structure of the linear presentation. At least now the
art is what to leave out not to draw in and there is plenty of scope for trial
and error.
While the adaptability of tactile representation and realisation is a medium-term
objective, freeing users from the tyranny of the one-size-fits-all, a much more
immediate benefit is surely the tie up between on-screen design and laser cutting
devices. Where swell paper provides inadequate definition the laser cutter will
take a good deal of pain out of collage preparation and it should also facilitate
a much wider and more subtle representation of texture and elevation.
So, together, the ability to take complex images and simplify them rather than
having to start with a blank piece of paper, the flexibility of size and richness
allowing for customisation and the ability to make much more accurate components
for collage will free the creative energies of diagram makers.
The question I ask myself is, given the new techniques, particularly related
to the chemistry and performance of paints and other materials which produce
images with patinas, how close to Picasso can we get with a specialist paintings
scanner and printer? Following on from that, how long will it be before the
distinction between the two dimensional representation with some differential
texture and materials depth and the three-dimensional model blurs beyond recognition?
I think that this is only a question of timing. We may soon want to look at
ourselves as diagram and model makers, more concerned with designing tactile
artefacts processes than with end products. While this is an exciting prospect
for the production of a myriad of useful tactile artefacts, such as city layouts
musical stave notation and sports tactical arrays, my own interest is in the
ability of technology to transmit representational tactile copies of unique
phenomena. Helen knows that I have spent years fighting a guerrilla war in the
Pompidou Centre in Paris to get my hands on Brancusi's sculpture of a seal,
La Forque, but I would not be so ardent if I could have my own near perfect
copy. Somewhere in materials analysis the computer assisted design will switch
from directing a laser cutter to a diamond knife.
Which brings us quite handily to the idea of haptics. Not long ago I was privileged
to take part in an experiment here which explored haptic object access through
a thimble-like access device. As the technology becomes more developed it will
be less constraining. ON the basis of the last twenty years of digital development
there is absolutely no reason to believe the pessimists who say that this technology
only has very limited use and that virtual reality is just a gimmick. Just as
we are able to copy and transmit digital files which can drive laser and other
kinds of cutting devices, so we can copy and transmit haptic files. Instead
of having to use a largely two-dimensional representation, you might read a
braille text and look at a haptic three-dimensional version of an object before
looking at the two dimensional hard copy. Having got the main coastal outlines
of a country in haptic you might be happier with a much more factually presented
hard copy of the same territory, or vice versa; you might want the complexity
in the haptic and the simplicity in the hard copy. Either way, the ability of
haptics to represent reality goes far beyond any static, hard copy, raised line
graphic. I am never going to be able to learn from a live horse how it gallops
but I might learn it from a haptic representation. People who do not see well
are naturally limited in their understanding of moving phenomena. We don't know
how bad because research has been so concentrated on reading and writing that
our ignorance is both scandalous and pitiful when it comes to moving pictures
and road traffic. As for mechanics, we are hopeless. Just as haptics will allow
surgeons to practice their skill without endangering a patient, so a blind child
will be able to put her hand inside the mouth of a crocodile and feel the jaw
close without sustaining an injury.
The realisation which new technologies offer is that of a bridge between reality
and scale. Until now we have chosen to represent large objects with smaller,
scaled down objects, but the digital environment will allow us to start with
reality and gradually scale down or to start with a miniature and gradually
scale up so that details are more readily grasped. We are all familiar now with
the coffee table plate of a Monet Rouen Cathedral picture and with the plate
of a cell as seen through a microscope and we are becoming ever more familiar
with the way in which these images can be manipulated, so now it is time to
use these techniques for people with visual impairments so that they can drive
the scale. This is, I have said, easy in the purely visual field and the technology
will develop to make phenomena more immediate. My favourite example of this
is the cathedral ceiling that looks from the ground, to most people, like the
surface of a Mars Bar but as you get closer to it you can see the gargoyles.
There is no reason now why we cannot build a virtual hoist which allows us to
make the journey virtually, as if we were being hoisted up towards the ceiling
to look at the gargoyles. The tactile experience will never be as refined as
this but it will improve as industry wants to do more modelling in three dimensions
before finalising product design. Tomorrow's prototypes will be the starting
point for extended tactile realisation.
When I say this kind of thing one reaction I often get is "But that will put
us out of a rewarding job". I faced the same kind of criticism when I advocated
using computers instead of Perkins Braillers for text transcription. Of course,
nothing of the sort happened; instead of transcribers having to input accurate
code a character at a time they could spend more time on layout and on descriptions
of graphics; and although the trend was hardly noticeable at first there is
now a steep increase in the quantity of braille being provided.
I want to see the same development in tactile materials. Just as computers have
assisted braille production, their power should be harnessed to do more of the
basic work so that routine tasks are replaced for the resources producer by
genuine craftwork and even, dare I say, artistic endeavour. It does not matter
how beautiful some of our creations have been in the past; their preparation
has been laborious and has usually had to meet more than one person's need.
Contrast the world of vision you live in and imagine what your world would be
like if visual imagery were rationed, locked, so to speak, in a visual dark
room with an occasional image flashed across a screen.
It is logical in presentations like this to start out with the why and then
proceed to the how; but I want to end with the "Why", to leave you with the
key message. It may sound rather harsh to say this but in spite of the recognition
of the value of the sense of touch to people who can not see well or cannot
see at all, the visual impairment industry has largely ignored the aesthetics
of touch and the materials to fill the gap; blind and visually impaired people
are aesthetically deprived and nowhere is that deprivation more poignant than
in the world of tactile materials, of maps, models, rugby line-outs and Escher
line drawings.
I promise that whatever you may be giving up what you face will be more interesting
and more challenging and be of more benefit to people like me; but the technology
will not just manifest itself in these new products. The down-side of rapid
change is that the weakest usually suffer worst from it, at least in the short
term, so that with every day that goes by the gap between the sighted computer
user and the VI user is growing ever wider. Once perhaps only a handful of people
in my village had ever seen the Mona Lisa in Paris; a generation ago maybe one
in ten had seen the picture in an art book; now it is available to anyone on
line. So, the future may be frightening for tactile producers but it is much
more frightening for consumers who will be ever further separated from the world
they live in, bewildered by conversations about matters of which they know little
or nothing.
This conference could hardly have come at a better time, on the verge of computer
technology leaving specialised environments and becoming part of the array of
domestic, consumer electronics. We are now in a race to see that the gap does
not widen between VI people and the rest of the world. We have no time to lose.