Tactile Maps for Visually Impaired

by Steven Landau, President of Touch Graphics

For people who have difficulty seeing, acquiring spatial and pictorial information is a challenge, and in our image-laden world, access to pictures has increasingly become a requirement for full participation in communal life. In 1996, Touch Graphics was formed as a for-profit company to perform research and to develop a number of graphical tools intended for a blind and visually impaired audience. These products and systems employ "tactile graphic" materials as their central feature. This work has been done in partnership, and is based on ten years of earlier research, by Computer Center for Visually Impaired People, Baruch College, City University of New York.