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1-2 December 2005
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Navigation: NCTD home > Conference Home > 2005 > Full paper P1b-ABC
Although I have been totally blind since the age of seven, I think of myself as a "visual" person. This probably sounds ridiculous - and indeed, I have been happily and efficiently using my other senses for more than forty years to access and make sense of the world. From a very young age, though, I loved pictures and colour, and my favourite activity was sitting for hours with a nice thick pad of clean white paper, some needle sharp grey lead pencils for outlines and a box of colours. I'll never forget the Christmas just after I'd started school at four years old: there inside the snowflake paper of my "big" present was a box of 36 long coloured pencils as well as a wooden pencil box containing a sharpener, eraser, ruler and several lead pencils with rubbers on the ends. The smell of new pencils still excites me, but then it was the colours that were breath-takingly magical. Seven different shades of blue - and a wonderful pale browny ginger, which I always called "eyebrow" colour. I forget who I knew with eyebrows that colour, but I really wished I had them, and everyone I drew did!
This early interest in pictures and drawing isn't surprising. My aunt and uncle both taught art, and my mother is an accomplished artist, specialising in textiles. This background meant that things of beauty, funny sights, interesting things, and tiny visual details were being pointed out to me from early babyhood. I watched, enjoyed and learned.
As young children do, I spent many hours "reading" books to my teddy bears, long before I could really read for myself. Remembering the gist of the story, and using the pictures as clues to where I was up to, I'd entertain my audience (and myself) for ages. My taste in pictures was decidedly unsophisticated then, and even now I can regrettably bring to my mind's eye quite clearly a book cover I adored at the age of about three. It showed a bright white lamb (no doubt with long eyelashes) prancing in a lurid green field of gaudily coloured flowers. My poor father remembers the nauseating story virtually verbatim to this day - and confirms that the text was as sentimental as the much-loved pictures! Several of my favourite (and much more tasteful) book illustrations from those early days are also still quite clear in my mind, especially the beautiful Orlando the Marmalade Cat, and lonely little Pascal with his red balloon. At about five or six I became fascinated by encyclopaedias and books of facts, particularly those to do with the animal kingdom. I distinctly remember a horrible picture of an enormous snake with a patterned skin and flicking tongue that had just swallowed a whole goat. The wretched victim could clearly be seen as a great bulge in the snake's neck. I re-visited that page with morbid fascination again and again.
My eye condition, Retinoblastoma or childhood eye cancer, meant that I had frequent hospital appointments and numerous spells as an in-patient, especially as my condition was being treated with daily radiotherapy or twice weekly cobalt therapy under anaesthetic towards the end. At this stage, puzzle books and games played on paper were hugely important - things like join the dots, trying to spot the twelve differences between two very similar pictures, finding the way through a maze, and so on. To wile away the long hours in hospital, we played endless games of noughts and crosses, and that silly game where each person draws a head, then folds the paper so only the neck can be seen, and passes it to the next to add the body, and so on, resulting in perhaps a lion's face with a businessman's body and ballerina's legs - creating much hilarity all round. I folded paper and cut out hundreds of strips of little people holding hands - then drew each one different clothes and faces - needless to say, all with gingery brown eyebrows!
When I grew up my ambition was to have a farm. Many hours went into drawing out plans to the tiniest detail, showing the fields, barns, farmhouse, tracks and gates, then marking in all the animals and trees. In my general drawing I was experimenting with colour combinations and was just at the very beginning of introducing perspective into some of my pictures when the eye specialist had to admit defeat.
When my distraught mum had to gently break the news that my remaining eye had to be removed two days later, my first question was "How will I be able to draw?"
As with so many things, the answer wasn't "You won't", but "We'll find a way". I soon discovered that, by placing the paper on a surface with a bit of "give" in it and pressing hard with the pencil point, I could feel the outlines I or someone else had drawn. I could then colour in the drawings, although unseen colours soon lost their interest for me. I still drew outline pictures though, and found new ways of making my farm plans - and later maps to accompany my favourite adventure books. A large piece of card replaced the piece of paper, and modelling materials such as plasticine could be rolled into very thin, smooth sausages, used singly for paths and in pairs for roads. Thicker lumpy sausages were hedges, and so on. Bits and pieces that had different textures could be added for water, walls and buildings. It took a lot longer, but was still very enjoyable.
Books were another matter altogether. I was quite a good print reader by the time I lost my sight, but still young enough to prefer the ones with lots of illustrations. Braille books were so dreary and such a daunting challenge, with endless pages and pages of dots, and nothing to relieve the hard work of deciphering them. I really missed pictures in those early days, and was not offered any kind of tactile illustration until four years later when I reached secondary school at the age of eleven and encountered thermoformed diagrams. Although most were things like the cross section of a leaf or a collection of quadrilaterals, I was thrilled. I still remember the first thermoform I saw, which showed the shape of two Roman amphorae found in an archaeological dig. Thermoform, increasingly rare these days, provided excellent representations of printed material. Very many hours of meticulous, fiddly work went into creating each collage master, which was then used to produce the duplicate copies on plastic material.
Another wonderful early find after losing my sight was vacuum formed plastic maps. This format enabled some physical features to be indicated in a very meaningful way, such as real high points where mountain peaks were, as well as representing land as being at a higher level than the rivers or sea. Although today's swell paper maps and diagrams are extremely useful and considerably quicker to produce, they don't offer the variety of textures and heights that were provided by thermoform and vacuum-formed plastic, and I regret the decline and disappearance of both formats.
Another revelation at secondary school was the use of plastic film sleeves for drawing. A rubber-faced mat slid inside the sleeve, and a "dead" biro was used to prevent inky fingers. Lines drawn firmly were very easy to feel as they puckered the film. Because there was a manilla paper backing, braille labels could be added afterwards using a Perkins Brailler, and the completed diagrams could then be filed without getting crumpled and spoilt. While these sleeves were mainly used at school to make our own mathematical drawings, it was also fun to draw outline pictures on them. I used to ask my mother and others to show me concepts I hadn't grasped before I lost my sight - like how to represent an item viewed at various angles, so that only parts of it were visible.
When my future husband was preparing to buy his first house after University, he carefully drew me floor plans on plastic film sleeves, showing how the upstairs and downstairs would look. The position of doors and the arc of their opening were marked with quarter circles, windows by a short line within the continuous lines indicating the house walls, and stairs by short parallel lines. David drew these plans for me when the house was only at the foundation digging stage, so that when we first visited it, I knew my way round instantly. Through this thoughtfulness, I also later understood enough basic aspects of drawing building plans to enable me to ask the architect who was designing our loft conversion to draw out the options for me on the modern equivalent, German film. I was then able to use these to select - and actually make suggestions for improvements to - the final design.
At our secondary school, even the children who had never seen were taught the print alphabet and numbers, and were encouraged to practise writing them. I still enjoy trying to make sense of the smallest raised letters on all manner of household items, and reading raised print by touch has many times got me out of a tricky situation, as I have been able to check road names on my travels in new areas. Of course, a "T-junction" or "L-shaped" room would mean little to a blind person who did not understand print letters at all. Similarly, the Star of David, Celtic cross, the logos of organisations, Tartan cloth, William Morris wallpaper, and so on don't conjure up anything particular in my mind's eye, despite all being very familiar concepts.
Although children who were born blind or who have no visual memory may find pictorial representations and diagrams particularly difficult to understand, many teachers are now tackling this head on. I don't remember anything like that when I was a young blind child. The modern world increasingly relies on visual media, such as animation, cartoons and photography that, while fantastically accessible and interesting to a sighted person, can exclude visually impaired people. This exclusion is probably a sad fact of life, but it is important none the less that children and adults should be helped and encouraged to embrace at least a rudimentary understanding of what these media offer. Even textbooks, tests and exams include much more graphic material now, and often have to be extensively modified to make them accessible to blind children. The most able interpreter of tactile diagrams would generally need a highly simplified and modified version of the print original to have a chance of understanding it.
Much work is needed in the early years in making the link between a real "thing", a model and finally a 2D representation. A real rabbit can be handled, for instance, and the main "rabbity" features noted - long ears and a little, fluffy bob tail, perhaps. From a selection of model animals, a child could then be encouraged to pick out the rabbit, by looking for its features, thus rejecting the prick-eared cat, the round-eared mouse, the squirrel with its huge fluffy tail and the curly-tailed pig. The ears and tails could then be exaggerated on 2D pictures of the same animals to help a child begin to recognise pictorial representations. It is important to remember that a child-like simplicity is essential at first, so that a four-legged animal has all four legs indicated on any picture.
Here in the UK we have started to introduce very young children to simple swell paper graphics through a pack of materials to develop essential pre-braille skills, which was launched at the first Tactile Graphics conference five years ago. Based on the popular fairytale Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, children are introduced to a very simple representation of, for instance, an apple. They are then asked to find the poisoned apple in a line of nice apples, where the bad one has its stalk pointing downwards while the rest point upwards. The ClearVision Library, which has for over twenty years loaned children's picture books with braille text added, is now rapidly building up a collection of tactile books, both those which are commercially available and many which have been specially made. "Feel Happy" books from the Living Paintings Trust present coloured thermoform pictures as well as descriptions on tape of other illustrations in their children's books, and these are adapted with braille text, enabling children who can't see to discover concepts such as a jagged mouth indicating anger.
Moving further afield, European funding supports Tactus, which encourages the creation and sharing of tactile books for children within the EU. I am fortunate to be going to Dijon, France next week as part of the judging panel for the annual Tactus competition, where we will have the onerous but hugely pleasurable task of picking two winners from sixty or more beautiful tactile books in seven or more languages. The winning books will be mass produced in a sheltered workshop, and distributed to all the participating countries, with the story in the appropriate language in print and braille.
The very fact that all of us are here today from every corner of the world is enough to demonstrate the interest in, and need for, tactile graphics. It is an exciting time technologically, with all sorts of things I hope to learn more of during this conference. But it isn't just high tech advances that are exciting. Wikki Sticks - short lengths of wax covered string in various colours - are excellent for making outline drawings. Nowadays, a visit to a museum, gallery or historic building is likely to be far more fulfilling for a blind or partially sighted person. A selection of artefacts may be available for handling, as well as models and tactile representations to examine, not to mention well-produced audio guides and explanations. Until a few years ago such a visit would generally consist of simply standing in front of glass case after glass case, being read odd bits of information about objects inside, and fighting a losing battle to stifle the increasingly frequent yawns!
We must be cautious, however, and work for high standards. Many people believe that to produce braille, you simply shove an electronic text through translation software, and a perfect copy appears from the embosser. Sadly, the format is often terrible, and while even poor quality braille is better than no braille at all, this is not what we should be aiming at. The production of swell paper images should never be seen as a mere act of copying something in print onto heat sensitive paper, raising the black areas and considering the job well done. We must be careful to ensure that those producing tactile graphics understand some fundamental points: any tactile graphic must be proofread by touch; textures and symbols that look very different often feel very similar, and vice versa; tactile graphics must be displayed flat or at a slightly sloping angle, not placed vertically on a wall, as this is most uncomfortable for the user; explanatory information in an audio or other format is hugely helpful to making sense of even a fairly simple tactile graphic.
From the tactile picture desert I encountered when I first lost my sight, I now have beautiful, tactually exciting textile artworks on my walls at home, which I can enjoy as much as my sighted guests. When holidaying or moving to a new area, I can obtain excellent swell paper maps from the RNIB. I recently visited the Isles of Scilly, and got so much more from my time there through using the book of tactile maps I took, and the wonderful relief map made by Dave Pardy for the visually impaired visitors. The well loved works of the great artists of all time no longer remain a mystery, as I can explore them through the excellent thermoforms produced by the Living Paintings Trust. And, if I'm lucky and I have grandchildren one day, we will be able to share feely picture books with braille text that I can read to them.
The desert is starting to bloom, so that I and other visually impaired children and adults can satisfy the visual inside us. Thank you to everyone here for what you are doing to enrich our lives by finding ways to present visual images to us. Now, forty years on, I touch, enjoy and learn.
Copyright RNIB 2006