skip to main content
10.1145/3290605.3300427acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Public Access

Designing Interactive 3D Printed Models with Teachers of the Visually Impaired

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Students with visual impairments struggle to learn various concepts in the academic curriculum because diagrams, images, and other visual are not accessible to them. To address this, researchers have design interactive 3D printed models (I3Ms) that provide audio descriptions when a user touches components of a model. In prior work, I3Ms were designed on an ad hoc basis, and it is currently unknown what general guidelines produce effective I3M designs. To address this gap, we conducted two studies with Teachers of the Visually Impaired (TVIs). First, we led two design workshops with 35 TVIs, who modified sample models and added interactive elements to them. Second, we worked with three TVIs to design three I3Ms in an iterative instructional design process. At the end of this process, the TVIs used the I3Ms we designed to teach their students. We conclude that I3Ms should (1) have effective tactile features (e.g., distinctive patterns between components), (2) contain both auditory and visual content (e.g., explanatory animations), and (3) consider pedagogical methods (e.g., overview before details).

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (paper197.mp4)
Supplemental video
MP4 File (paper197p.mp4)
Preview video

References

[1]
AER. 2018. Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from https://aerbvi. org/
[2]
American Printing House. 2018. Product: DNA Twist. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from https://shop.aph.org/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ Product_DNATwist_1-08978-00P_10001_11051
[3]
American Printing House. 2018. Product: Tactile World Globe. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from http://shop.aph.org/webapp/wcs/stores/ servlet/Product_Tactile%20World%20Globe_39214108P_10001_11051
[4]
Apple. {n. d.}. AVAudioPlayer - AVFoundation | Apple Developer Documentation. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from https://developer.apple. com/documentation/avfoundation/avaudioplayer?language=objc
[5]
Apple. {n. d.}. AVSpeechSynthesizer - AVFoundation | Apple Developer Documentation. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/ avspeechsynthesizer?language=objc
[6]
Apple. {n. d.}. SFSpeechRecognizer - Speech | Apple Developer Documentation. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from https://developer.apple. com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrecognizer?language=objc
[7]
Apple. {n. d.}. UIImage - UIKit | Apple Developer Documentation. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from https://developer.apple.com/ documentation/uikit/uiimage?language=objc
[8]
Mark L. Batshaw. 2002. Children with disabilities. MacLennan & Petty.
[9]
Quentin Bonnard, Severin Lemaignan, Guillaume Zuferey, Andrea Mazzei, Sebastien Cuendet, Nan Li, Ayberk Ozgur, and Pierre Dillenbourg. 2013. Chilitags 2: Robust Fiducial Markers for Augmented Reality and Robotics.
[10]
Gary R. Bradski and Adrian. Kaehler. 2008. Learning OpenCV : computer vision with the OpenCV library. O'Reilly. 555 pages.
[11]
Craig Brown and Amy Hurst. 2012. VizTouch: automatically generated tactile visualizations of coordinate spaces. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI '12). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 131--138.
[12]
Emeline Brule, Gilles Bailly, Anke Brock, Frédéric Valentin, Grégoire Denis, and Christophe Joufrais. 2016. MapSense: Multi-Sensory Interactive Maps for Children Living with Visual Impairments. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). 445--457.
[13]
Erin Buehler, Stacy Branham, Abdullah Ali, Jeremy J Chang, Megan Kelly Hofmann, Amy Hurst, and Shaun K. Kane. 2015. Sharing is Caring: Assistive Technology Designs on Thingiverse. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). 525--534.
[14]
Erin Buehler, Niara Comrie, Megan Hofmann, Samantha McDonald, and Amy Hurst. 2016. Investigating the Implications of 3D Printing in Special Education. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 8, 3 (2016), 1--28.
[15]
Erin Buehler, Amy Hurst, and Megan Hofmann. 2014. Coming to grips: 3D printing for accessibility. In Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 291--292.
[16]
Erin Buehler, Shaun K. Kane, and Amy Hurst. 2014. ABC and 3D: opportunities and obstacles to 3D printing in special education environments. In Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 107--114.
[17]
Stéphanie Giraud, Anke M. Brock, Marc J-M Macé, and Christophe Joufrais. 2017. Map Learning with a 3D Printed Interactive SmallScale Model: Improvement of Space and Text Memorization in Visually Impaired Students. Frontiers in Psychology 8 (6 2017), 930.
[18]
Timo Götzelmann. 2016. LucentMaps: 3D Printed Audiovisual Tactile Maps for Blind and Visually Impaired People. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '16). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 81--90.
[19]
Timo Götzelmann. 2018. Visually Augmented Audio-Tactile Graphics for Visually Impaired People. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 11, 8 (2018), 31.
[20]
Timo Götzelmann and Aleksander Pavkovic. 2014. Towards automatically generated tactile detail maps by 3D printers for blind persons. In International Conference on Computers for Handicapped Persons, Vol. 8548 LNCS. 1--7.
[21]
Noreen Grice, Carol Christian, Antonella Nota, and Perry Greenfeld. 2015. 3D Printing Technology: A Unique Way of Making Hubble Space Telescope Images Accessible to Non-Visual Learners. Journal of Blindness Innovation and Research 5, 1 (2015).
[22]
Jaume Gual, Marina Puyuelo, and Joaquim Lloveras. 2011. Universal design and visual impairment: Tactile products for heritage access. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 11), Impacting Society Through Engineering Design, Vol. 5. 155--164. http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2. 0--84858852744&partnerID=tZOtx3y1
[23]
Jaume Gual, Marina Puyuelo, and Joaquim Lloveras. 2014. Threedimensional tactile symbols produced by 3D Printing: Improving the process of memorizing a tactile map key. British Journal of Visual Impairment 32, 3 (2014), 263--278.
[24]
Jaume Gual, Marina Puyuelo, Joaquim Lloveras, and Lola Merino. 2012. Visual Impairment and urban orientation. Pilot study with tactile maps produced through 3D Printing. Psyecology 3, 2 (2012), 239--250.
[25]
Anhong Guo, Jeeeun Kim, Xiang 'Anthony Chen, Tom Yeh, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankof, and Jefrey P. Bigham. 2017. Facade: Autogenerating Tactile Interfaces to Appliances. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). 5826--5838.
[26]
Megan Hofmann, Jefrey Harris, Scott E. Hudson, and Jennifer Mankof. 2016. Helping Hands: Requirements for a Prototyping Methodology for Upper-limb Prosthetics Users. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1769--1780.
[27]
Leona Holloway, Kim Marriott, and Matthew Butler. 2018. Accessible Maps for the Blind : Comparing 3D Printed Models with Tactile Graphics. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, Paper 198, 13 pages.
[28]
Michele Hu. 2015. Exploring New Paradigms for Accessible 3D Printed Graphs. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '15). 365--366.
[29]
Amy Hurst and Jasmine Tobias. 2011. Empowering individuals with do-it-yourself assistive technology. In The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (ASSETS '11). 11--18.
[30]
Shaun K. Kane and Jefrey P. Bigham. 2014. Tracking@ stemxcomet: teaching programming to blind students via 3D printing, crisis management, and twitter. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '14). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 247--252.
[31]
Jeeeun Kim and Tom Yeh. 2015. Toward 3D-Printed Movable Tactile Pictures for Children with Visual Impairments. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). 2815--2824.
[32]
Michael A. Kolitsky. 2014. 3D Printed Tactile Learning Objects: Proof of Concept. Journal of Blindness Innovation and Research 4, 1 (10 2014), 4--51.
[33]
Michael A. Kolitsky. 2014. Making Tactile 3D Prints Talk. Retrieved January 4, 2019 from http://www.instructables.com/id/ Making-Tactile-3D-Prints-Talk/
[34]
Samantha McDonald, Joshua Dutterer, Ali Abdolrahmani, Shaun K. Kane, and Amy Hurst. 2014. Tactile aids for visually impaired graphical design education. In Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 275--276.
[35]
M. David Merrill, Leston Drake, Mark J. Lacy, and Jean Pratt. 1996. Reclaiming instructional design. Educational Technology 36, 5 (1996), 5--7.
[36]
Huaishu Peng, François Guimbretière, James McCann, and Scott Hudson. 2016. A 3D Printer for Interactive Electromagnetic Devices. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '16). 553--562.
[37]
Huaishu Peng, Jennifer Mankof, Scott E. Hudson, and James McCann. 2015. A Layered Fabric 3D Printer for Soft Interactive Objects. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). 1789--1798.
[38]
George M. Piskurich. 2015. Rapid instructional design: Learning ID fast and right. John Wiley & Sons.
[39]
Andreas Reichinger, Anton Fuhrmann, Stefan Maierhofer, and Werner Purgathofer. 2016. Gesture-Based Interactive Audio Guide on Tactile Reliefs. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '16). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 91--100.
[40]
Robert A. Resier. 2002. A history of Instructional Design and Technology. In Trends and Issues in Instructional Design. 26--53.
[41]
Audrey C. Rule, Greg P. Stefanich, Robert M. Boody, and Belinda Peifer. 2011. Impact of adaptive materials on teachers and their students with visual impairments in secondary science and mathematics classes. International Journal of Science Education 33, 6 (2011), 865--887.
[42]
Johnny Saldana. 2015. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Vol. 109. Sage.
[43]
Martin Schmitz, Mohammadreza Khalilbeigi, Matthias Balwierz, Roman Lissermann, Max Mühlhäuser, and Jürgen Steimle. 2015. Capricate: A Fabrication Pipeline to Design and 3D Print Capacitive Touch Sensors for Interactive Objects. Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST '15) (2015), 253--258.
[44]
Lei Shi. 2015. Talkabel: A Labeling Method for 3D Printed Models. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS'15). ACM, New York, New York, USA, 361--362.
[45]
Lei Shi, Ross McLachlan, Yuhang Zhao, and Shiri Azenkot. 2016. Magic Touch: Interacting with 3D Printed Graphics. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '16). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 329--330.
[46]
Lei Shi, Idan Zelzer, Catherine Feng, and Shiri Azenkot. 2016. Tickers and Talker: An Accessible Labeling Toolkit for 3D Printed Models. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 4896--4907.
[47]
Lei Shi, Yuhang Zhao, and Shiri Azenkot. 2017. Designing Interactions for 3D Printed Models with Blind People. In In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '17).
[48]
Lei Shi, Yuhang Zhao, and Shiri Azenkot. 2017. Markit and Talkit: A Low-Barrier Toolkit to Augment 3D Printed Models with Audio Annotations. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '17). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 493--506.
[49]
Abigale Stangl, Chia-Lo Hsu, and Tom Yeh. 2015. Transcribing across the senses: community eforts to create 3D printable accessible tactile pictures for young children with visual impairments. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '15). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 127--137.
[50]
Abigale Stangl, Jeeeun Kim, and Tom Yeh. 2014. 3D printed tactile picture books for children with visual impairments. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Interaction design and children (IDC '14). ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 321--324.
[51]
Brandon Taylor, Anind Dey, Dan Siewiorek, and Asim Smailagic. 2016. Customizable 3D Printed Tactile Maps as Interactive Overlays. In ASSETS '16. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 71--79.
[52]
Brandon T. Taylor, Anind K. Dey, Dan P. Siewiorek, and Asim Smailagic. 2015. TactileMaps.net: A web interface for generating customized 3Dprintable tactile maps. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '15). 427-- 428.
[53]
Jolene K. Teske, Phyllis Gray, Mason A. Kuhn, Courtney K. Clausen, Latisha L. Smith, Sukainah A. Alsubia, Maryam Ghayoorad, Audrey C. Rule, and Jean Suchsland Schneider. 2014. Teacher-Made Tactile Science Materials with Critical and Creative Thinking Activities for Learners Including Those with Visual Impairments. Online Submission (2014).
[54]
Martha Thurlow, Christopher Johnstone, Joseph Timmons, and Jason Altman. 2009. Survey of teachers of students with visual impairments: Students served and their access to state assessments of reading. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, Technology Assisted Reading Assessment (2009).
[55]
Henry B. Wedler, Sarah R. Cohen, Rebecca L. Davis, Jason G. Harrison, Matthew R. Siebert, Dan Willenbring, Christian S. Hamann, Jared T. Shaw, and Dean J. Tantillo. 2012. Applied Computational Chemistry for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Journal of Chemical Education 89, 11 (2012), 1400--1404.
[56]
Yang Zhang, Gierad Laput, and Chris Harrison. 2017. Electrick : Low Cost Touch Sensing Using Electric Field Tomography. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17) (2017), 1--14.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)How to make teaching of wood anatomy more engaging with 3D dataInternational Wood Products Journal10.1177/20426445241302178Online publication date: 3-Feb-2025
  • (2025)How Can Haptic Feedback Assist People with Blind and Low Vision (BLV): A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/371193118:1(1-57)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Revisiting visual accessibility with non-textual content: challenges and solutions for human-computer interactionProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702105(1-18)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Designing Interactive 3D Printed Models with Teachers of the Visually Impaired

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2019
    9077 pages
    ISBN:9781450359702
    DOI:10.1145/3290605
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 02 May 2019

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. interactive 3d printed models
    2. user-centered design

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    Conference

    CHI '19
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 703 of 2,958 submissions, 24%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)467
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)62
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)How to make teaching of wood anatomy more engaging with 3D dataInternational Wood Products Journal10.1177/20426445241302178Online publication date: 3-Feb-2025
    • (2025)How Can Haptic Feedback Assist People with Blind and Low Vision (BLV): A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/371193118:1(1-57)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Revisiting visual accessibility with non-textual content: challenges and solutions for human-computer interactionProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702105(1-18)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Direct or Immersive? Comparing Smartphone-based Museum Guide Systems for Blind VisitorsProceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference10.1145/3677846.3677856(10-22)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)Towards Designing Digital Learning Tools for Students with Cortical/Cerebral Visual Impairments: Leveraging Insights from Teachers of the Visually ImpairedProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675636(1-18)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
    • (2024)ChartA11y: Designing Accessible Touch Experiences of Visualizations with Blind Smartphone UsersProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675611(1-15)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
    • (2024)MoiréWidgets: High-Precision, Passive Tangible Interfaces via Moiré EffectProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642734(1-10)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)When Refreshable Tactile Displays Meet Conversational Agents: Investigating Accessible Data Presentation and Analysis with Touch and SpeechIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345635831:1(864-874)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
    • (2024)MyWay: a 3D and audio-enhanced transportation learning kit for the visually impaired teenagersCCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction10.1007/s42486-024-00163-yOnline publication date: 23-Jul-2024
    • (2023)ShapeSonic: Sonifying Fingertip Interactions for Non-Visual Virtual Shape PerceptionSIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers10.1145/3610548.3618246(1-9)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Login options

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media