3D Printing Illustrations for the Visually Impaired

Anybody who grew up reading the stories of Roald Dahl will be au fait with illustrations of Quentin Blake. “With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.” Once said the great illustrator.

It is the job of the illustrator to enhance or elucidate writing and children’s literature is seldom without the etchings of an illustrator to aid the imagination. For those with visual impairments, experiencing the sketches of Blake, Raymond Briggs, Eric Carle amongst others has been virtually impossible.

MyMiniFactory have launched 3D Printed Tactile Graphics For The Blind; a project dedicated to create resources to improve the experience of literature for the blind and partially sighted through rendering illustrations and graphics from well-known fiction into tactile objects.

The pilot project takes in the most famous work of French aristocrat, writer and poet and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; The Little Prince. The novella is the second highest selling single volume book of all time, sandwiched in between The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

MyMiniFactory designer and artist Eva Sbaraini took Saint-Exupéry’s instantly recognisable illustrations and envisaged them into 3D models, which were then 3D printed. MyMiniFactory worked with the Royal London Society for Blind People in order to evolve the concept through a series of focus groups with visually impaired people.

MyMinifactory have released all six files for anybody to freely download (we must say they're pretty nice even without the added bonus of their outreach properties) and the repository is hoping to grow the resource of 3D models from a wide range of historical and contemporary fiction.

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