Lauren Race
ITP Alum Lauren Race was profiled in IEEE Spectrum for her work on tactile diagrams for electronic schematics.
ITP had accepted its first blind and low-vision students, which prompted Tom Igoe, who teaches the introductory physical computing class to make the course materials more accessible. The class’s labs are built around the Arduino Uno microcontroller, but the schematics were inaccessible to these students. Because of her previous career as an art director and designer, Race was recruited by Igoe to look into converting the schematics into a tactile form, which developed into her thesis project.
Race began by printing the class’s circuit diagrams directly onto Swell Touch Paper. Often used by schools and museums to create tactile images and other graphics, this paper makes lines and areas printed in black ink swell up to create a raised surface when a sheet is passed through a fuser machine. “I quickly realized after I did a usability test that these don’t work. [Just] printing out what’s there, and making it tactile, does not make it readable,” says Race. So she started iterating, and reached out to assistive technology experts in the blind and low-vision community such as Fleet and Joshua Miele, creator of the Blind Arduino Project.
Read the full article here.