CAREER: Adaptive Tactile Picture Books for Blind Children during Emergent Literacy

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This research is motivated by the importance of a child's early experiences with picture books during emergent literacy, which is the period when a child gradually learns to read. Picture books connect visual literacy, cultural literacy, and print literacy, which is crucial for a child's literacy development. But only a limited number of children's books have tactile pictures accessible to blind children, and these typically cannot be modified to suit a child's particular needs. With this in mind, the PI will investigate 3D printing as the technical mechanism to physically realize a variation of an adaptive tactile picture that is optimized for a specific child and to "make" just one unique copy of it, something which is not possible with conventional printing approaches geared toward mass production of a uniform design. Achieving this vision will change the way tactile pictures are made available to visually impaired children; a parent or a teacher will be able to download a digital 3D model of a tactile picture book from a website, adapt the model for the child, 3D print the model, and read the resulting "one-of-a-kind" book together with the child. Research products will include a website for sharing 3D tactile pictures and open source tools for creating them.In this project, which integrates science, design, and engineering, the PI will exploit 3D printing to overcome the lack of adaptation in conventional one-size-fits-all tactile pictures. Specific Aim 1 will establish a new experimental framework, based on large-scale dissemination to families and video-based behavioral observations of children, for scientifically studying 3D-printed tactile pictures. Specific Aim 2 will uncover the principles to elicit preferences and abilities from a visually impaired child, and the adaptive transformations necessary to optimize the design of a tactile picture specifically for that child. Specific Aim 3 will introduce technical innovations to optimize the 3D printing of tactile pictures, to simplify 3D modeling software to empower more people to model tactile pictures, and to automate certain repetitive and laborious steps using computer vision. To achieve these goals, the PI will partner with the Anchor Center for Blind Children, the National Center on Severe and Sensory Disabilities, the Colorado Talking Book Library, and the National Braille Press, all of which are organizations with a shared interest in promoting emergent literacy development of visually impaired children. Project outcomes will advance our understanding of tactile pictures geared toward visually impaired children, and of the tactilization process for storybook pictures.