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A comparison of three materials used for tactile symbols to communicate colour to children and young people with visual impairments

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posted on 2016-03-31, 13:55 authored by Sabrina Ramsamy-Iranah, Martin MaguireMartin Maguire, James A. Gardner, Satyadev Rosunee, Naraindr Kistamah
A series of 14 tactile symbols were developed to represent different colours and shades for children and young people who are blind or have visual impairment. A study compared three different methods for representing the symbols: (1) embroidered thread, (2) heated ‘swell’ paper, and (3) representation in plastic using Additive Manufacturing (AM; three-dimensional printing). The results show that for all three materials, the recognition of particular symbols varied between 2.40 and 3.95 s. The average times for the three materials across all colours were 2.26 s for AM material, 3.20 s for swell paper, and 4.03 s for embroidered symbols. These findings can be explained by the fact that the AM material (polylactide) is firmer and more easily perceived tactually than the other two materials. While AM plastic offers a potentially useful means to communicate colours for appropriate objects, traditional media are still important in certain contexts.

History

School

  • Design

Published in

British Journal of Visual Impairment

Volume

34

Issue

1

Pages

54 - 71

Citation

RAMSAMY-IRANAH, S. ...et al., 2016. A comparison of three materials used for tactile symbols to communicate colour to children and young people with visual impairments. British Journal of Visual Impairment, 34(1), pp. 54-71.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal British Journal of Visual Impairment and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0264619615610161

ISSN

0264-6196

eISSN

1744-5809

Language

  • en