Feels pretty (Image: Casey A. Cass/University of Boulder)

TIME to get hands-on. A new project is printing Braille picture books for visually impaired children. Each page turns the pictures from the original book into raised 3D shapes alongside traditional Braille text.

“The advantage of 3D-printing is really about making one-of-a-kind objects,” says Tom Yeh, who heads up the Tactile Picture Books Project at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Later this year, Yeh’s group will work with the National Braille Press in Boston to offer children a copy of Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin that has a page customised with the child’s name in Braille.

Over the past few months, the team has used this method to print children’s classics like Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Copies were given to children at the Anchor Center for Blind Children in Denver. In the future they hope people can print their own Braille stories on demand.


The 3D-printed books can be rather fragile, says Alice Applebaum, the centre’s executive director. But she is excited about the possibility of using Yeh’s books to help students learn to read. “Since our children have limited or no vision, having a book that they can feel gives them a sense of what the world looks like,” Applebaum says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “3D printed books get personal for blind children”