Stories Archives - Thinkable products for visually impaired people

Designing 30/60/90 degrees triangle tool for the TactiPad

A math teacher came to us with the question: ‘Can you create a 30/60/90 degree version of a triangle tool for the TactiPad’? He wants his students to draw 3D shapes such as cubes, prisms and pyramids. Being interested to improve/extend the Thinkable products we have taken up this challenge.

After describing the details of the tool, we present some of the decisions we made during the design process. You will also find information on some of the aspects of the creation of ‘3D space’ using the TactiPad.

Jaap Breider introducing Eskandar Abadi to tactile graphics

In late summer 2021, Thinkable CEO Jaap Breider was visited by journalist Eskandar Abadi and film maker Shahab Kermani. They produced a video for Deutsche Welle TV (Persian department). Jaap was accompanied and interviewed during one day in his house and company headquarters in Huissen (NL).

Besides receiving his guest, talking about himself and Thinkable, Jaap explains the basics of tactile graphics to the interviewer. Being a blind man himself, he is obviously experiencing something completely new: Jaap draws or plots graphics for him while he also explains the “codes” behind certain ways of drawing from the seeing world.

It is these kinds of moments that keep Jaap inspired since decades. With Thinkable, he constantly works on innovations to give ever more VIPs access to tactile graphic information.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_Lg3yekKE

Emily Schlenker’s story

As blind students, drawing and the visual aspects of math and science are often dismissed as a waste of time or impossible. This totally disregards those students, like myself who happen to be visual learners. My brain thrives on pictures, in spite of the years of teachers and professors striving to cram me into the memorizer box that is assigned to blind learners.
Once I got away from so-called blindness experts/educators, I entered the real academic world. I am completing my pre-med requirements, and my physics professor and tutor both made it clear that if I wanted to do physics, I would be exposed to drawings one way or another.

Theo’s challenge for the MDA

I was looking forward to finding out what progress had been made on the motorized drawing arm since I saw the prototype at Sight village last year.
I heard that it could draw out pictures so I planned a test for it. First I downloaded a copy of my school logo (png file) onto my phone before Sight Village (2019).