Graphisme tactile appliqué aux illustrations de manuels scolaires à l'usage d'enfants ayant une déficience visuelle

This article presents research on making schoolbook illustrations accessible for students with visual impairment. The MaskGen system was developed to interactively transpose illustrations of schoolbooks into tactile graphics. A methodology was designed to transpose the graphics and prepare them to be displayed on the STReSS, a refreshable tactile device. We experimented different associations of tactile rendering and audio feedbacks to find a model that children with visual impairment could use. We experimented with three scientific graphics (diagram, bar chart and map) with forty participants: twenty sighted adults, ten adults with visual impairment, and ten children with visual impairment. Results show that the participants with visual impairment liked the tactile graphics and could use them to explore illustrations and to answer questions about their content.