A novel learning system that bridges the physical and digital, designed for the needs of children with vision loss.
Focus Area
How do blind children learn about science and math, if they only have access to braille (text) and audio? Even simple concepts like the water cycle, or complex diagrams like the combustion engine require a minimum amount of visual imagery, which blind people have minimal access to, making their education severely stunted. This lack of access, compounded across years of education, effectively excludes blind people from several fields of employment and livelihood.
We work on this precise problem, by creating tactile graphics — images that are embossed and textured, so they can be read by the fingertips. We also have an interactive audio companion through a smartphone app, that makes it possible for blind children to learn independently.
Watch a demonstration of how our technology work, in this interactive number book, and a book of animals.
Product Priorities
After several months of conversations with stakeholders including blind children, blind adults, parents, teachers, special educators, and education policy makers, we understand that these factors are important for blind education:
1. access to same information as sighted peers, including visual content.
2. raised expectations and learning goals, recognising higher potential.
3. formalising higher quality testing methods for tactile/visual content.
4. ability to learn without assistance, independently
We continue to create resources based on concepts that teachers think are most important, and cannot be taught without the help of tactile imagery. frequent testing with blind children is part of our design process.
User Stories
A 26 yr old with congenital blindness works as a pan-India social media marketing manager. He has a degree in computer applications and management. Until a year back, he had never had access to a map of India, or the world map. When Tactopus made an India political map, and a state map for him in an audio-tactile format, he was able to better understand geographies and correlate that information with his work. He also complains of underdeveloped math skills as he never had the resources to practice math, the way many of his sighted classmates did. The math games we’re developing for early learning will be useful for him even as an adult.
12 year old Visalakshi was born blind and has mild cerebral palsy. She has not been accepted at any blind school as she is non-verbal and teachers were not equipped to educate her. She stays at home, listens to music all day, is paranoid of touching new things and does not explore her surroundings like children her age should. Her aunt heard about Tactopus and bought her our books on animals and counting. Visalakshi would normally not readily explore tactile graphics, and it takes a lot of assistance from her mother. When we made the Tactopus audio assistant play her favourite nursery rhymes to go with different animal tactiles, she opened up and began exploring the pictures with her fingertips. Her parents have expressed the wish that could buy many more tactopus books, as they want to provide their daughter with all the resources they would have been able to give her if she did not have a disability.
When you think of educational resources for children, there is a flood of choice in the form of illustrated books, activity books, smartphone/iPad applications, etc. In comparison, accessible and universally designed products are extremely few. At Tactopus, we envision a future where every child, irrespective of disabilities, has resources that work for them, that are enjoyable and rich in learning outcomes, so we begin to bridge the inequality that exists today, in access to quality education.
📷Learning resources commonly available to the sighted and to the blind.
It’s also important to us to make the resources a part of a general, mainstream market so that it’s more commonly available, and not limited to the special education section. Widening the markets we reach also means that accessible resources are valued and understood by more people, and more awareness about nuances of access is always positive.
The reason for lower expectations society has from blind children is because a) we do not appreciate the potential of young minds irrespective of disability, largely since b) we don’t have accessible resources that enable blind children to reach their full potential. Our hope, theory of change, is that when we create accessible resources, it will enable children to learn better and outshine the expectations placed on them.
We work in partnerships with stakeholders who are actively strengthening the learning ecosystem for blind children.
Why Early Intervention
Our work is constantly informed by the needs of special educators, parents, and of course the interests and needs of blind children themselves. In all our testing interactions with blind individuals — adults as well as children, we repeatedly see that tactile perception skills need to be introduced early in the learning process. Another strong reason is that the gap in access to learning has to be bridged as early as possible, so that it doesn’t become a difficult task for a child to catch up later.
Having said that, we’ve also found that some of the early learning material we’ve created are equally interesting to blind adults, as they’ve not had access to tactile material growing up.
Our plan is to create content starting with early learning needs and scale rapidly to address primary school level learning needs as well.
Teacher’s Tools
Our books and interactive games are designed to serve different needs such as:
Discovery — sighted children have unlimited opportunities to visually observe their environment, whereas many of those learnings need to be provided in alternate forms for a blind student. For example, the animal book is about exposure to the world of animals, and harnesses sounds to make it interesting and relatable.
Practice — once a concept is taught in class, textbooks often have a lot of activity sheets for concept reinforcement. This is necessary for children to get comfortable with facts and information before moving on to the next concept. Many activities in NCERT textbooks are not available in an accessible format today. The practice-oriented games we’ve created address the need for children to be able to practice concepts taught by teachers in their own pace, in comfortable, independent settings. This is crucial for allowing children to develop confidence in concepts and find eagerness to learn more.
On request — we constantly seek feedback and guidance from the community to help us create the right tools to supplement the pedagogy. If you’ve got an idea, talk to us.
Books on the Shelf
Over the past year, we created a few books an interactive experiences, and have a long list of pipeline projects in the works. Here’s a link to our online store, where you can order books directly. If you’re an institution seeking to place orders above 10 units, we can discuss a discounted price if you write to us at hello@tactopus.com.
Tactopus Online Store
Thanks for reading about our work, please do connect with the team to talk in more detail.
Chandni, chandni@tactopus.com
Saloni, saloni@tactopus.com
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