WHAT ARE THEY?

TACTILE PICTURE BOOKS
Books to be read with your eyes and your fingers
Tactile picture books are not very well-known, but they are fascinating. They feature both print and Braille text along with illustrations designed to be explored and recognized by both sight and touch. This makes them accessible and extremely stimulating for children with a different array of abilities.

BEAUTY AND ACCESSIBILITY
Turn on your ingenuity
The challenge of designing tactile picture books is a great one, but a fascinating one as well. It is necessary to strike a perfect balance between the narration and the accessibility without one of the two prevailing over the other.
As good-looking as it may be, a book that doesn’t respect a child’s specific reading needs is useless. The same thing can be said of a book that is perfectly accessible but expressionless and trivial.
For this reason, tactile book authors must be able to channel all of their creativity. Very often these books use ingenious solutions and truly mesmerizing interactive mechanisms.

A SOPHISTICATED PRODUCTION
Specialized design and manufacturing
Because of the peculiarity of their building process, tactile picture books are impossible to mass produce. Depending on the crafting process, every single book requires a certain amount of manual work which inevitably has an impact on availability and on the final price.
On average, compared to traditional illustrated books, tactile picture books are sold for higher prices and are usually hard to find in online and physical bookstores. These aspects allow for very few publishing companies to specialize in this segment.

A STIMULUS TO INTEGRATION
A book as a place to meet and create relationships
The difficulties should not, however, hold back the production and the proliferation of tactile picture books. Their potential is truly extraordinary.
For a differently able child, reading together is a unique possibility to share an experience and a moment of pleasure, which can then be the basis for a conversation and a relationship. A child’s imagination is a fertile ground on which they can meet easily and naturally despite their differences.
Tactile picture books thus become an important mediation tool that helps promote a different culture of inclusion, in which everyone can become a bearer of knowledge and competence, and eventually, of enrichment worth spreading.

Elena Corniglia graduated in Italian Literature, Philology and Linguistics and specialized in Children’s Literature. She is the head of Vietato Non Sfogliare, center for the research on accessible books for children, part of the association Area onlus di Torino. Since 2013 she has been collaborating with LiBeR, a magazine on children’s books, writing articles about the relation between disabilities and children’s literature.

A tactile book, an undercover agent.

Tactile picture books are important for both visually impaired and sighted children.

For visually impaired children, they are a tool to explore the world with, and they aid the development of literacy. In their own environment, blind children are rarely confronted with written texts: outside, they see no posters, no advertisements. At home, they often don’t have any Braille texts, no understandable writings on their toys or other objects, and the books they are familiar with are completely smooth and the pictures they have are very hard to perceive.

Marion Ripley states that "Books with tactile illustrations can open up a world of new information, new concepts, and new vocabulary for a child with visual impairment. They encourage the development of tactile skills and provide the motivation to learn to read. They are also great fun."

Books with illustrations appeal to all children, since they present ideas and topics within their reach, different approaches, sometimes poetic, sometimes informative, and a dialogue between text and pictures which enhances the meaning of both elements. Books with tactile illustrations and Braille text is thus an excellent tool for integration. They allow the act of reading to be a shared experience with friends, siblings or parents. This is also about sharing a respectful, reciprocal relationship. These books bridge sighted, visually impaired and blind persons, and their ability to form early bonds between these worlds makes them priceless. The fact that they assign the same value to tactile esthetics and visual esthetics truly helps the promotion of differences, a crucial factor in the reciprocal enrichment of children.

Translated from L’intérêt de l’album tactillustré dans l’éveil cognitif et social du jeune enfant déficient visuel Anne-Lise Schwab et Dominique Vallat, HEP Vaud, 2010.

*Ripley Marion, 2007. Creating a Loans Collection of Books with Tactile Illustrations for Young Children with a Visual Impairment. Speech at the World Library and Information Congress, Durban.

Dominique Vallat, ispecialized teacher and therapist for visual rehabilitation for the visually impaired. She founded and managed Touche-à-Tout, a toy-library at the Centre Pédagogique pour élèves handicappés de la vue (CPHV) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through special books and games, the center offers the possibility for sighted, visually impaired and blind children to read and play together.