Tactile Graphics - MENTOR

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Tactile Graphics give blind people spatial information and are frequently used to show maps, floor plans and routes.   Tactile Graphics are quickly and easily produced on the Optek range of embossers

Tactile Graphics are also useful for teaching blind children the spatial nature of shapes, the relative sizes of objects, the relative positioning of components  (eg how machines work) and more abstract representations such as graphs, pie charts and so on.

‘Any Raised Graphic can be used with the Nomad Mentor pad, or the pad can be used as a drawing surface, a standard graphic placed upon it and the outline ‘traced’ onto the pad and then the resulting drawing can be sent from the Nomad Mentor pad to a Braille Embosser to create a Raised Graphic.’

This is a picture of the Mentor Nomad Pad, showing someone drawing on it with a balck felt tip pen. They are drawing a street plan. Behind the pad, and connected to it is a Mountbatten Brailler.


Nomad MENTOR

Nomad is a touch sensitive pad that can be connected to a PC running the MENTOR software.  It is possible to draw shapes on a piece of paper lying on the pad. The tracing will be reproduced by the MENTOR software on the computer screen.  The piece of paper can then be put in an embosser and the screen image embossed over it.  The resulting Tactile Graphic can then be positioned back on the Nomad pad for further work.

 


Further editing of the image is done with the MENTOR software's screen image of the tactile graphic.  Areas can be traced out either with a mouse pointer or directly by tracing on the pad.  These areas can then be marked as having spoken text attachments.  For example, in a map of the world, the outline of Australia could be traced, and the text "Australia" typed in as the text attachment.  Two levels of attachments are possible for any single point on the graphic:  the first level is a short sentence identifying the point, the second level is the name of a text file, of unlimited length, which can give as much information about that point as is required. 

 

When all areas and points on the graphic have been annotated in this way, the computer version of the graphic can be saved for later use, or directly used in conjunction with the Nomad pad.  A blind child, for example, could feel the raised dot shapes of the Map of the World and then, by pressing on any particular spot, have spoken out loud by the pad's speech synthesiser, the text attachment - for example "Australia".  This arrangement means that the Tactile Graphic does not have to be cluttered up with braille descriptions and delivers pure spatial information, whilst factual information is delivered by speech. 
This is a picture of the Mentor Nomad pad, with a world map on it. The cursor, a small red hand is pointing to Australia.
A variety of functions are available with the Nomad MENTOR, including resizing portions of the graphic, searching for objects in the graphic, and speaking the distance travelled along a trace or between points.

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