The Tactile Talking Tablet

Peter Chevins, School of Life Sciences, The Centre for Bioscience at Keele University

In my application for funding for a Tactile Talking Tablet (T3) I wrote “It is intended to make use of the T3 technology to design and make bespoke materials ultimately for all 3 years of the Biology and Neuroscience courses. On the timescale of this application, materials for at least one Neuroscience module will be made and tested between September and December 2006.”

I am glad to be able to report that the short-term objective has been achieved, and that we are making good progress towards the two-year aim of making our degree courses fully accessible to visually impaired students.

The T3 is the European version of the Talking Tactile Tablet owned by Touch Graphics, New York, sold and promoted by the Royal National College for the Blind (RNCB) at Hereford. To quote their website, it is “A touch sensitive, multi sensory device which provides instant audio feedback from tactile images. This combination of sound and touch transforms the way in which people who are visually impaired can access graphical information.” T3 on the RNC website. RNCB provide the touch-screen together with software for associating audible commentary with tactile diagrams, so that when selected areas of the images are lightly pressed by the student, s/he hears information about the structures in the diagram. They also provide some sample overlays as examples of what can be produced.

We at Keele have provided the associated laptop computer, the Zyfuser which converts images to tactile diagrams, the special swell paper, printer and audio equipment for adding the sound. RNCB have been generous with their time in providing two days of training, which has been invaluable, and we extend our thanks particularly to Elaine Edwards at the Hereford College for this.

Our initial work with the T3 has been to create alternative laboratory exercises for two visually impaired students studying in the second year of our Neuroscience degree programme. During the autumn semester they were participating in a module titled “From Neurone to Brain” in which there were practical classes involving light and electron microscopy. The T3 proved ideal for these purposes. The students first visited the electron microscope suite and saw the transmission and scanning machines. The visually impaired students were able to feel the machines: one of them has sufficient residual vision to see at least something. They then had the components and function of the machines explained with the aid of diagrams. We had previously produced a tactile version of the TEM cutaway diagram (Figure 1).

When the overlay is placed on the touch-screen its correct positioning is first verified by the student pressing the dot at the top left then the one at the bottom right: they are raised bumps on the tactile diagram. The system then identifies the diagram by a unique number on the top line, which is not fully illustrated in figure 1.



The student then hears the following instruction: “Feel the shape of the image with your fingers. Press down lightly with one finger to hear the name of the object you are touching. Pressing a second time will give you further information. You can interrupt speech at any time either by moving to a different object or by pressing on the background of the page outside any object.” In this case pressing anywhere on the yellow column would identify the electron beam, and on the red objects the electromagnetic lenses, etc. The diagrams are normally brightly coloured to give extra assistance to students with some residual vision.
The students’ next exercise was to learn to interpret electron micrographs of sections through brain tissue. An example used by the sighted students is shown as figure 2 with the T3 tactile diagram produced to give the visually impaired students some understanding of the main features of this is shown on the right.



It will be immediately obvious that much of the detail has been removed, as this is confusing when working in tactile mode: the advice from RNCB is to make the diagrams as simple as is consistent with achieving the learning outcomes of the exercise.
Part of the exercise was for the sighted students to measure the diameter of a selection of the synaptic vesicles which are shown in the tactile diagram as the pink dots in the two axon terminals (pale blue). The further aim was to test statistically whether was a difference in the diameters of the vesicles in the two terminals. It had been hoped to find a way for the visually impaired students to accomplish this with the aid of a “clickable ruler”, but in the event this did not prove possible. The teaching assistant made the measurements and the VI students performed the statistics. Touch Graphics do have at least one tactile diagram (a world map) on which it is possible to read off the distance between any two points (cities on the map) but the technology is not yet available for users to write this feature into their own diagrams. That would be a useful development for scientific users.
Other exercises undertaken during the module included one in which students learned to interpret images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and one in which students interpreted light microscope images of sections through the rat cerebellum. In both cases T3 diagrams were made that enabled the visually impaired students to participate in the exercises.
These have been our first attempts at creating tactile talking diagrams, and we have learned much, both from evaluations by our visually impaired students and from the RNCB. We are now working on further modules on development of the nervous system and T3 diagrams of chick embryos at various stages of development are under development. I shall be presenting a talk on our work (with appropriate acknowledgement to JISC TechDis) at the forthcoming Science Education conference at Keele in June this year.