Designing While Blind: Nonvisual Tools and Inclusive Workflows for Tactile Graphic Creation
Lauren Race, Chancey Fleet, Danielle Montour, Lindsay Yazzolino, Marco Salsiccia, Claire Ferrari, Sheri Wells-Jensen, Amy Hurst · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023) · doi:10.1145/3597638.3614546
Summary
This experience report examines the challenges and opportunities of Blind-led tactile graphic design, documenting a project where a team of four Blind designers, one sighted designer, and one sighted researcher collaborated to create tactile graphics for AstroAccess, a nonprofit focused on disabled inclusion in the space industry. The team designed tactile symbols to help Blind crew members and passengers orient themselves aboard zero-gravity flights, including symbols for emergency exits and gravity direction. The paper addresses a fundamental problem in tactile graphic creation: Blind people are largely excluded from designing the nonvisual media they consume because mainstream CAD software like Adobe Illustrator is inaccessible to screen reader users. The team used a three-step design process: first, Blind designers created low-fidelity sketches using drawing film and drawing boards, which produce an instant tactile line that can be felt immediately; second, a sighted designer rendered these sketches digitally as vector graphics in Illustrator; and third, the team printed designs on microcapsule paper to create raised 2.5D tactile prototypes for evaluation. The work took place initially in person at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library in New York City, then shifted to asynchronous remote collaboration over email and phone, iterating through nine versions of the designs. The paper builds on four years of prior collaboration among the team members on tactile schematics for STEM education, including accessible Arduino and soldering workshops.
Key findings
The study identified a significant "bottleneck effect" in the co-design workflow: the four Blind designers were forced to pause their creative work while waiting for the single sighted designer to convert their tactile sketches into digital vector format, disrupting their creative flow. Remote asynchronous work further compounded this problem, with feedback trickling in over four weeks via email. Despite these challenges, the Blind-led process successfully produced tactile graphics that were used on an actual zero-gravity flight. The paper evaluates four accessible design tool options: TactileView (screen reader accessible but costs $485), accessible co-design with a sighted designer (quick to start but creates dependency), hand-coding SVGs (free and fully accessible since text editors work with screen readers), and analog drawing tools like drawing boards and tactile graph paper (immediate but low-fidelity). Refreshable tactile displays remain impractical due to three barriers: prohibitive cost (need to be under $4,000), lack of ubiquity in public settings, and insufficient resolution (10-15 dots per inch versus 100 for embossed graphics). The team maintained equity by actively agreeing to correct each other on ableist actions without defensiveness, preventing the sighted designer from inadvertently controlling the design process.
Relevance
This paper challenges a deeply embedded assumption in accessibility work: that sighted professionals should lead the creation of nonvisual media. For practitioners, it offers a practical framework for structuring Blind-led design teams where sighted members play supporting rather than leading roles. The recommendations around building trust, centering nonvisual techniques, and matching tools to team needs are directly applicable to any organization producing tactile materials for libraries, museums, education, or wayfinding. The finding that hand-coding SVGs offers Blind designers full creative independence is particularly actionable, as SVG syntax is similar to HTML and fully accessible via screen readers. The paper also highlights how the lack of accessible professional design tools perpetuates the exclusion of disabled people from creative professions, connecting to broader employment equity concerns given the 63% unemployment rate among Blind and low vision adults.
Tags: tactile graphics · blindness · co-design · inclusive design · nonvisual design · assistive technology · design tools
Standards referenced: WCAG 2.1