Introducing Tactile Picture Books for Blind Children

Picture books have delighted young children from the first one that was published in 1658 through today. Illustrations help make the stories come alive for little ones. Tactile books that add touch to illustrations help children learn and grow and that’s why so many baby and toddler book add this feature. But tactile books are also bringing the joy of picture books to  children who are blind or visually impaired.

These tactile books that are two dimensional are created by the Living Paintings organization to include the sense of touch to children who frequently cannot do the same activities as their sighted peers, according to the organization. With 20,000 children in the UK experiencing vision loss, these books – called Touch to See, can transform lives.  

Living Paintings
Living Paintings is a charity in the UK that has been around for more than 35 years, reported the Gazette. Located in Basingstoke, the organization’s mission is to provide access to their hand-crafted adapted tactile and audio picture books to families and schools for no fees.

Volunteers of the organization have recently become a social media sensation when a series of videos that featured how the books are made amassed 6.7 million views. The videos featured volunteers adapting the popular children’s books that included The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are.

Volunteer Len Webb, 88, who has been with the charity for more than 20 years, told the Gazette: “I’m really not used to being in the spotlight and I never expected that I’d be getting all these lovely messages from people around the world, but it’s so nice to see the work of the charity getting all this recognition.

“Volunteering at Living Paintings is a nice thing to do in my retirement, using my woodwork and painting skills for something good. It’s a great sense of community and all for a really wonderful purpose.”

How the Books are Made
All of the Living Paintings books are handmade, reported Positive News. Webb uses a chisel to carve the illustrations. He is currently working on the underwater creatures that are illustrated in Julia Donaldson’s picture book, Tiddler.

Afterwards, Webb uses a fine sandpaper to smooth the surfaces of the carvings. The main challenge he told Positive News, “is carving tactile images that our visually impaired library members will find easy to follow.”

Once the two-dimensional images are completed, multiple copies will be reproduced with a thermopress machine that creates molds and creates the images in plastic. After approximately 35 copies are made, the images are hand-painted by one of the 120 volunteers. It takes around six months to produce the images for a book.

A Success Story
While parenthood can have many ups and downs, parenting a child who is blind or visually impaired makes the journey more complicated, according to Living book’s website. Andy and Laura Baghurst, a family who borrows books from the Living Paintings free library have three boys, two of them were diagnosed with Aniridia shortly after birth. This is the same condition that Andy  Baghurst has.

Aniridia is Latin for lack of an iris which means that the father and sons cannot control how much light goes into their eyes and that the back of the eye never fully developed. While 20/20 vision is the norm, people with this condition see between 3/60 to 6/60.

Laura Baghurs told the organization, “One of my early concerns with Daniel was how he would access books. Joshua has grown up loving Julia Donaldson and other books and having a great experience with them. It’s great to have Andy’s point of view as he’s lived with the same condition his whole life and he has learned a way of doing things, but I worry as a parent. With a little baby, who hasn’t yet learned how to navigate the world and life’s challenges, you have a whole different perspective.”

Daniel, who is now four-years-old, is learning to read with the help of enlarged bold fonts. But before he could read, he couldn’t appreciate books because he couldn’t see the pictures. Now with the help of the living Paintings postal library he can fully experience books.