Graphical Tactile Display Application: Design of Digital Braille Textbook and Initial Findings

According to WHO statistics in 2020, there were approximately 253 million visually impaired people worldwide, including 36 million blind individuals. Blind students learn the same knowledge as ordinary students do in their schools, but they lack a lot of graphical and image information as a learning aid. With the development of electronic graphical tactile display, in this paper, a digital version of Braille textbook is proposed and designed. It not only displays the paper-based Braille texts, but also includes related tactile images and illustrations, therefore the blind students can read texts and images in pair. A serial of initial design guidelines and principles for digital Braille textbook are discussed, followed by the five typical design examples. Twelve blind students in a primary school experienced five lessons of digital Braille textbook, and most of them showed positive responses. Our findings pave the way for future work on improving the user experience of tactile interface design that support the learning by digital Braille textbook.