After the production of the Braille nameplate set, the Polo Meccatronica facility renews its commitment to making objects and services more usable for people with visual impairment thanks to additive manufacturing. The technologists at the mechatronic prototyping centre have in fact created a miniature cave that will allow children with low vision or with visual impairment to study stalactites or stalagmites by touching the model.
An accessible book: focus on the project
The request to create and 3D print the object came from the AbilNova Social Cooperative, Trento’s centre for the visually and hearing impaired. The Trento-based centre set ProM Facility the challenge of developing a model with attention to detail, which will be used in schools to explain to children with low vision or with visual impairment how rocks are made.
The idea was born within the framework of the European Erasmus Plus project Flex Picture Ebook, with the aim of creating a digital picture book accessible to all children, including those with visual impairment.
The book in question is ‘Émile veut une chauve-souris‘ by Vincent Cuvellier, ‘Ben wants a bat’ in the English version, and will allow young readers to adjust the readability of the text and illustrations or activate sound and visual animations on the pages that are more difficult to understand.
“A pedagogical guide has been created to help adults develop good educational practices and new devices for digital accessibility” explains Roberta Zumiani of AbilNova. “Among the suggestions that have emerged is that of presenting children, before or during reading, with 3D objects, which can support the development of certain concepts that would otherwise be difficult to describe in words alone, especially for young children.”
Development in ProM Facility
The mechatronic prototyping and product development centre in Rovereto is already well known in the world of the visually impaired for having devised the Braille text converter software that can automatically generate the 3D files needed to print soft tags or polyurethane markers.
With reference to the design of the miniature cave, Facility Technologist Engineer Matteo Perini says: “The model, moulded to a size suitable for a child’s hands and enriched with details showing various rock formations, was made of Polyamide 12, a material certified for skin contact. Polyamide guarantees a good level of detail that the trained sense of touch of visually impaired pupils will be able to grasp, as well as good solidity of the structure, a key element since the cave will pass from hand to hand among the children of the different classes during the reading of the book”.
