Designing Haptic Graphics for Mathematics
By: Dennis Willemsen - 05/21/2015

Towards Accessible Math Education for Blind Students

This graduation project is commissioned by Royal Dutch Visio, in light of the
development of the Ideal Textbook; a project to make the entire secondary
school curriculum accessible on an iPad, to students who are blind. This
report focusses on the design of a haptic solution to make graphical aids
used in secondary school mathematics accessible on a tablet device. Initiated
by a context analysis, the design exploration consists of two iterations; the
first focussing on utilising haptic technologies, while the second focusses
on utilising 3D printers to create multimodal drawings.

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.

Read the entire thesis at:
http://denniswillemsen.nl/Dennis%20Willemsen_Designing%20Haptic%20Graphics.pdf

Submitted by Alexa Fay Siu