Master's Thesis:
Authoring and Assessing Automatically Generated Tactile Graphics

Images like photographs, paintings, and illustrations are used to convey important information in educational, professional, and cultural settings. Blind and low vision (BLV) individuals can access such images via verbal or text descriptions, or tactile graphics that can capture rich spatial detail often lost from text alone. However, tactile graphics remain rare as they require specialized design and fabrication expertise to create. Prior work has explored approaches to take an image (e.g., a diagram) and automatically convert it into a given tactile medium (e.g., an embossing of the diagram outline with braille labels). However, the appropriate tactile medium depends on the image content and audience expertise such that a single medium may not be appropriate for all images or audience members. To lower the barrier of entry for non-experts designing and fabricating tactile graphics to meet diverse image and audience needs, we present a system that generates multiple tactile mediums at once for a given image: outlines for paper embossings, 2.5D or "bas-relief'' models for 3D printing, and fully 3D models for 3D printing. A preliminary evaluation of our system with educators in museums and schools and BLV audience members indicated enthusiasm for integrating the system in existing programs, and revealed initial benefits and tensions of presenting multiple tactile graphics from creation and consumption perspectives.