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(Full Transcript Below)
Rebecca Blaevoet from Tactile Vision Graphics joins Jeff Thompson in the Blind Abilities studio and talks about the new contract with Disney to produce accessible coloring books. Rebecca talks about the products and services Tactile vision Graphics provides and how they started in the business.
Below) Rebecca Blaevoet from Tactile Vision Graphics joins Jeff Thompson in the Blind Abilities studio and talks about the new contract with Disney to produce accessible coloring books. Rebecca talks about the products and services Tactile vision Graphics provides and how they started in the business.
From Tactile Maps, Braille Greeting Cards and providing people with the accessible material at a timely rate. From handouts, to knitting plans, the team at Tactile Vision Graphics takes pride in their work and attention to detail. Rebecca is visually impaired and understands the need for Braille and Tactile production as it allows for enclusion and access to information not readily available.
Join Rebecca and Jeff in this conversation on Tactile, Braille and accessible coloring books. Yes, Disney Coloring books!
Be sure to check out Tactile vision Graphics on the web.
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You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
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Full Transcript:
Accessible Disney Coloring Books? Yes, Coming Soon! Learn about Tactile Maps, Braille Greeting Cards, and the Wonderful Services from Tactile Vision Graphics.
Rebecca:
Yeah, we’ve grown up with coloring books and we grew up with Disney. One of the things about our coloring books that we’ve always found is they’re sort of inclusionary, vision-impaired kids can kind of have a cool sort of interactive activity that they’re sighted peers understand.
Jeff Thompson:
From Tactile Vision Graphics, Rebecca Blaevoet.
Rebecca:
If a young person or an early reader who picks up one of our coloring books, they can also practice reading. We’re great proponents of braille and tactile in museums, big time.
Jeff Thompson:
Creating Disney coloring books for the visually impaired.
Rebecca:
Well my husband is the ideas guy. So he years ago said you know what, we should really approach Disney and see about doing braille coloring books. And I said you gotta be kidding, come on, they wouldn’t talk to us. We can do the braille for the roses in red on top of the color print, and so it’s quite good. We can do transparent braille even, so you can have the braille dots in transparent ink.
Jeff Thompson:
Tactile maps, braille greeting cards, accessible coloring books, accessible calipers, from tactilevisiongraphics.com.
Jeff Thompson:
Isn’t that amazing? You make that phone call and what if they do say yes?
Rebecca:
I know, I know, that’s the risk, right? The only risk is that they’re gonna say yes. And it was a good risk.
Jeff Thompson:
And we’re so glad that Rebecca took the time to come and join us in the studios at Blind Abilities, that’s where you can find podcasts with a blindness perspective. Check us out on the web at wwww.blindabilities.com, on Twitter at Blind Abilities, and download the free Bind Abilities app from the app store and Google Play store. That’s two words, Blind Abilities. And I wanna thank you, the listener, for tuning in to Blind Abilities. And now please welcome Rebecca Blaevoet from Tactile Vision Graphics. We hope you enjoy.
Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. Today we’re talking to Rebecca Blaevoet and she’s from Tactile Vision Graphics from Ontario, Canada. How you doin’ Rebecca?
Rebecca:
Just fine, thank you for having me on your show.
Jeff Thompson:
Thanks for taking the time on such a short notice coming on to Blind Abilities and sharing some of the news and about what you do with Tactile Graphics, braille and books, all sorts of stuff. And especially these coloring books that I just heard about that you’re gonna be doing with Disney.
Rebecca:
Yeah, it’s really exciting.
Jeff Thompson:
So how are you doing?
Rebecca:
I’m well, I’m well, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
That’s good, well is good.
Rebecca:
Well is good, yes.
Jeff Thompson:
So where are you from?
Rebecca:
We are in Windsor, Ontario.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh my gosh.
Rebecca:
So not that far from you I think.
Jeff Thompson:
That explains the metric calipers.
Rebecca:
Yes, metric and the imperial calipers.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, that really caught my attention because I do woodworking and having calipers, especially accessible calipers, would be a great benefit. So finding that on your website was really cool.
Rebecca:
A lot of our customers are in the states, but we do things that are sort of Canadian relevant as well.
Jeff Thompson:
I found a whole slew of stuff, books, coloring books of course.
Rebecca:
Oh, yeah, yep, tons of things.
Jeff Thompson:
As soon as I opened it up and I saw you do tactile maps for campus, or transcribe stuff into braille, it was like oh, I get it. So many times people start campus and they got an idea of it, but it’s nice to get a general tactile feel of relationships.
Rebecca:
Absolutely.
Jeff Thompson:
We have East Bank and West Bank at the U of M, so they could definitely find the river and then give them an idea of where it is. That’s how I like to use tactile.
Rebecca:
Oh, absolutely. And not everybody has a lot of facility with it, that’s the thing. The more information you have, the better, Even if people didn’t grow up using tactile graphics very much.
Jeff Thompson:
So you’re vision-impaired yourself.
Rebecca:
Yes, I am. Yep, my husband is fully sighted, but I’m vision-impaired.
Jeff Thompson:
What got you into the tactile and the braille side of things?
Rebecca:
Well, it’s kind of an interesting story actually because my husband and I had talked about starting a business and we both wanted to do that. And I thought we would end up doing language translation and it’s a very, very difficult field to break into. There’s a tremendous amount of competition and it’s worldwide and a lot of it is automated. And it’s terrible, it’s not even, it really gets subcontracted and subcontracted. So we did a bit of language translation work and my husband said look, you’re an expert in braille, there’s a gap in the market for good braille translation companies that actually have people who are blind working in them. And he said why don’t we look into starting a business doing that? So between the braille and the tactile graphics, which there really was a gap at that point, we started a business. We were living in Europe at the time and so it was in Britain. And then we had the opportunity to, there was a company here in Canada and they were retiring and they wanted somebody to take over the business who understood about braille and tactile graphics and they approached us to do it. So that was how we ended up back over here.
Jeff Thompson:
That’s really cool. When did you start reading braille?
Rebecca:
I was six probably.
Jeff Thompson:
Six.
Rebecca:
So a lot of years ago.
Jeff Thompson:
Great time to start, right?
Rebecca:
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Not everybody has that privilege of starting to read braille when they’re six, but if you do, it’s great.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, I was 36 when I got the opportunity to start digging in to–
Rebecca:
I see, I see, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Actually, some girls at the school wrote me a note, so I was forced to read. If there’s a motive to read, there you go.
Rebecca:
That’s right, that’ll be it for sure.
Jeff Thompson:
A teacher actually had me pick a braille book of a book, my last book that I had read.
Rebecca:
That’s a fabulous technique for getting somebody motivated to read braille.
Jeff Thompson:
And children’s books.
Rebecca:
Yep.
Jeff Thompson:
Because you kinda can almost predict the sentences. You’re almost following along, but you’re moving forward.
Rebecca:
That’s right.
Jeff Thompson:
Something I could relate to, like let’s hop on pop.
Rebecca:
As an adult that’s exactly right, especially familiar children’s books, rhyming books, yeah, all sorts of good techniques for that.
Jeff Thompson:
And that’s something that Tactile Vision Graphics has.
Rebecca:
Yeah, we do a lot of children’s books and that we inherited from the people who had the business before us. We think it’s really important to have some early learning books where it’s letters and numbers, and also raised print and images that go along with that. And we have some basic storybooks and things that are in grade one braille and contracted braille, a little bit more of the more advanced things, but that’s when we get into custom production more than sort of standard offerings. But the coloring books, an interesting development from that because vision-impaired people don’t, sometimes we don’t know what it is we’re touching in terms of an image. Because in print you can use perspective and all sorts of other sort of devices to communicate three dimensionality when it’s only two dimensions. And so early on we said you know what, we should label these pictures because it’s gonna teach people what the shapes of things are in sort of in the abstract. And if you’ve only been used to touching, I dunno, a three-dimensional fireplace for example, how would you depict a fireplace in a tactile graphic when a person might be used to touching what a mantel feels like or the brickwork on the side of a fireplace? So it seemed important to label the pictures, that also teaches reading. If it’s a young person or an early reader who picks up one of our coloring books, they can also practice reading. So there’s a sort of multi-learning happening with our stuff a lot of the time.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, one of the things that I always found interesting when I first came across tactile graphics is I was just checking it out and someone says it’s George Washington crossing the Delaware, or something, or the Potomac. Better get my rivers right, the Delaware.
Rebecca:
Which is it?
Jeff Thompson:
Luckily it was labeled, so I could figure it out.
Rebecca:
Yeah, that’s right, exactly. You do need a hint sometimes.
Jeff Thompson:
Like you said, perspective. You mentioned coloring books and that’s something that happened to strike my attention. Could you tell us something that happened with Disney and your books?
Rebecca:
Well my husband is the ideas guy. So he years ago said you know what, we should really approach Disney and see about doing braille coloring books. And I said you gotta be kidding.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, right.
Rebecca:
Come on, they wouldn’t talk to us. Anyway, he said no, look, here’s a phone number, call them.
Rebecca:
So I did with a fair bit of trepidation. Didn’t get anywhere on the first phone number, I think they were going through some restructuring at that point. They were renaming some of their branches and things, consumer media and interactive. But we persevered and found another phone number and got to talk to somebody in New York who immediately gave us the phone number of somebody else. And that’s where it started. So it was about a year and a half ago that we made our first phone contact with people who really seemed quite interested in our idea about doing braille learning activity books, primarily coloring books, but then with other sort of learning pages included. And they really liked the idea. And so little by little we’ve developed a plan and they came with a contract and we’re starting design work now. So it’s very exciting. We have 15 books planned over the next three years. We may increase that number on various different themes, classics, series with Mickey Mouse and Bambi and Winnie the Pooh and things.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s Disney.
Rebecca:
It’s Disney, I know, I know, it’s crazy.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s endless, plus your husband was right.
Rebecca:
Yeah, he was. Yep, his ideas are usually good ones. I’m the bean counter in the middle going well I don’t know whether we can afford that. I don’t know how many, anyway, I’m very much tend to be the pragmatist about these things. But he was right.
Jeff Thompson:
Well Disney beans are good.
Rebecca:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
That’s good for you, that’s what got it into the news. Disney, it was like Disney? Oh, tactile. It makes so much sense because we’ve grown up with coloring books.
Rebecca:
Yeah, we’ve grown up with coloring books and we grew up with Disney. One of the things about our coloring books that we’ve always found is they’re sort of inclusionary. They promote inclusion. Vision-impaired kids can kind of have a cool sort of interactive activity that their sighted peers understand. And everybody wants to color as a kid whether you can see or whether you can’t see. And here’s an opportunity to do that and these characters are ones that we all know. So at least people who grew up in North America certainly do and Europe, and I venture to say they’re pretty worldwide in terms of their popularity.
Jeff Thompson:
My brain always like to think real fast and I’m going do you remember paint by number?
Rebecca:
Yep, I never did it, but I do remember that–
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, I remember that, it made you like perfect.
Rebecca:
I know, yes, yes, absolutely. Well, the scope is as creative as we wanna be in terms of what can be included in these activity books. But everything that we design has to go through them. They’re very, very, what’s the word I’m looking for? They’re extremely conscientious in helping you as a licensee kinda get it right. And also their brand is important to them so they wanna make sure that everything that gets released is good, that they can be proud of it.
Jeff Thompson:
Well that’s good. I think they have one of the highest quality controls over their brand.
Rebecca:
They’re amazing. Yeah, yeah, we’ve learned so much about quality control working with them, they’re very, very thorough.
Jeff Thompson:
This even leads into, this may not be something that you’ve thought about, but like a braille label for a crayon.
Rebecca:
Yeah, well we do braille labels. We haven’t done any for crayons, it’s a fabulous idea. We do braille stickers and braille labels. It’s actually a really good, good suggestion.
Jeff Thompson:
Your website’s quite extensive with some of the stuff and it actually casts ideas to people too, because the first time I opened it up I saw tactile maps for a campus. What a better thing for a person to get a perspective or a relationship to the geographic layout of a campus?
Rebecca:
Yeah, yeah, a university campus or a college campus is often so big and so picturesque, and lots of open spaces and curving paths. And as you say, U of M has a river and how does that feature into the landscape of a campus? And vision-impaired people are already starting with a sort of less information than their sighted counterparts have. So having tactile maps of campuses are a really useful tool, however extensively or not a person would use that item, it’s a good thing to have available.
Jeff Thompson:
Kinda gives us a peak, just a little hint. Like oh, that’s next to the library.
Rebecca:
That’s it, exactly.
Jeff Thompson:
I know that. And the next time they go they can stop with their cane or their guide dog and know if they go one block further or the next building, which some campuses is a block.
Rebecca:
Something like the name of a street, Sunset Street. Okay, is that just within the campus or if you see a building, some other building unrelated in the city that’s got the same address, it’s got an address on Sunset Street, you’d say oh geeze, I wonder if I could take that street back up to the university campus? I bet I could. It gives you other clues to how to navigate around the city you live in and how to make your travel as seamless as possible as a pedestrian like with a guide dog or with a white cane, or even on a bus route.
Jeff Thompson:
Plus you do transcription for braille.
Rebecca:
Yep, we do.
Jeff Thompson:
Like if someone had handouts or something.
Rebecca:
Yeah, yeah, we like doing that kind of stuff, academic transcription. We can work to fairly tight deadlines. We enjoy those sorts of projects where it seems like an impossible amount of text to have to generate in a finite number of days and it’s like yeah, bring it, we’ll take it. It’s always helpful if we have some idea that it’s coming, it’s nice. We’ve sometimes gotten a university or college will say look, we’ve got this math exam coming up, the exam’s happening next Wednesday, we probably won’t get it till Monday, can you do it? And we’re like yeah, email us as soon as you have it, we’ll put it in the UPS or Purolater the next day, we’ll turn it around and get it back to you on the exam day if we have to.
Jeff Thompson:
That’s good service.
Rebecca:
We think so.
Jeff Thompson:
Timing is everything when you’re talking about receiving braille at the same time your cohorts receive their books and stuff, that’s always been an issue.
Rebecca:
And I certainly know from my own experience that if you’re taking a course and it’s complicated, say it’s in my case it was Russian, and having books arrive a year late. What kind of craziness is that? You shouldn’t have to receive your course materials a year late. And if that’s what that the company that you tend to send stuff out to does, well find a different company. Because students oughtn’t to have to wait that long. But that can go for academic materials, but it can also, I remember at one point early on we were at a trade show and we were approached by two elderly women who said we’re part of a knitting club and we asked our local blindness agency to produce a pattern and they said we’d have to wait nine months for it. Well our knitting club is starting the pattern next week, can you do it for us? And we said sure. It’s a lot of work, patterns are a lot of work. Anyway, we got it done for them. And they were able to participate with their knitting club. When everybody else had the pattern, so did they. And that’s a lot of fun. It’s fun to be able to give somebody that kind of contemporary sort of inclusion as well.
Jeff Thompson:
Well getting there on time because no student wants to graduate and then start receiving their books afterwards.
Rebecca:
No, that’s an insult. Yeah, it’s true.
Jeff Thompson:
We talked about campuses and tactile maps for this and that, but I saw museums. Now that’s really important to me because I’ve been to museums and I shuffle around, walking around, and yeah, there’s something behind the glass or there’s something over here. And there’s these big placards that have something written on them and people are going oh, hmm.
Rebecca:
I know, people can spend 10 minutes in front of those things.
Jeff Thompson:
And yet with a map, they can actually know what’s in front of them.
Rebecca:
Yeah, we do a fair bit of work with museums, both maps, sort of floor plans to help people know where the exhibits are located. But also overlays for artifacts that might be behind glass or information booklets about a particular museum exhibit. So it’s not practical to put braille all over those big panels that you’re talking about. I really try to discourage museum curators from thinking that that’s a good idea, because you’ve got a vision-impaired person whose gotta stand there and hold their arms up horizontally out in front of them, but read a vertical space for as long as it takes to get through the braille. But also they’re blocking the way for other museum visitors to be able to read the placards as well. So we tend to recommend a portable sort of booklet that somebody can take with them and maybe find a place to sit and read if they want to, maybe in the museum coffee shop or maybe they have benches or seats and tables to sit outside of a particular exhibit. A lot of museums have audio guides as well, which are great, except that it closes you off from your family or friends that you’re strolling around the museum with. Where a portable booklet you can still read that and be interacting with your family and friends as well. We’re great proponents of braille and tactile in museums, big time.
Jeff Thompson:
Awesome. Now when you’re talking about doing a map or something of that nature, do you use like a thermal braille? is there some method or process? I know a lot of people that are into braille and tactile have all these techniques and stuff, what’s your popular way of–
Rebecca:
We do have a particular process which it’s quite unique, there are only a couple of other companies in the world that use it, and it’s not swell paper and it’s not Thermoform and it’s not embossed, it’s its own thing. And it’s a proprietary technique, but it allows us to be able to do colored braille. So for instance, we do greeting cards and stuff as well. So that’s a perfect application for this where it might be a greeting card in full color, say it’s a Valentine’s card and it’s in full color and it’s got red roses and everything. We can do the braille for the roses in red on top of the color print. And so it’s quite good, we can do transparent braille even. So you can have the braille dots in transparent ink on top of a print piece of paper. And that works well for menus and stuff too ’cause you can have a bar menu or something where it’s a wine list and then the braille is transparent on top of that.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh, that’s nice.
Rebecca:
But that’s unique to our process. It’s very durable, it feels nice, and it’s quite unique. It’s also a little bit labor intensive because it’s very much a hand done process, but it produces a good effect.
Jeff Thompson:
And that’s what matters.
Rebecca:
Yep, I think for the end user that’s what matters.
Jeff Thompson:
And people can find these greeting cards, these book, coloring books, maps, and request some special stuff that might be unique to them.
Rebecca:
Yes.
Jeff Thompson:
Like I even saw something that was a recycling schedule. I never thought about–
Rebecca:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Thompson:
Is it on Tuesday or is it on next Tuesday?
Rebecca:
Yeah, yep, yep. Now of course with smartphones you can get some cities anyway that are sort of progressive and think about these things. You can get e-reminders and e-waste schedules, but like our desktop calendars and our pocket calendars, some people really function better with that kind of reference material in a physical format that they can refer to. And so a recycling schedule would be a great application as well for that. Yes, people can request all of that stuff from our website which is tactilevisiongraphics.com. There’s a contact us link, there’s phone number, email address, all of that.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s all right there.
Rebecca:
Yep.
Jeff Thompson:
Rebecca, when can people expect to see their first coloring books with the Disney characters?
Rebecca:
That is a good question. We expected that we would be ready to start shipping at the end of January, but they have told us that that’s far too ambitious and we need to push that deadline back by a couple of weeks. So I would think that it’ll be soon, but given the fact that we’re learning a lot about this process the farther we go into it, I hesitate to forecast a date. However, I do believe that once we get the first one out, it’s a pretty steep learning curve to know how to do the vetting process, but once we get the first one out, subsequent books can come out in fairly quick succession.
Jeff Thompson:
That’s great. So when we get out of this big deep freeze, we have something to look forward to in the springtime.
Rebecca:
Yes, yes indeed, indeed we do.
Jeff Thompson:
Well Rebecca, I wanna thank you very much for coming on the Blind Abilities and sharing this great news about the Disney books, about the products that you provide. If you’re interested, check it out. That’s tactilevisiongraphics.com.
Rebecca:
Dotcom.
Jeff Thompson:
There we go.
Rebecca:
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, I really appreciate it. And just that you reached out to us.
Jeff Thompson:
Nothing against sighted or differentiating between sighted and blind or something, but it’s so neat to know that I’m so glad you’re blind, put it that way.
Rebecca:
Yeah, I hear ya.
Jeff Thompson:
But people who get into businesses like this, it’s nice that they have a perspective of what is good braille, what is good tactile quality-wise? And with your experience starting at age six, you know what good braille is.
Rebecca:
That’s right.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah.
Rebecca:
Yep, I do. My husband and I make a, I think we make a pretty good team because as I say, he’s the ideas guy, he’s good at the graphics side of it, and I’m a dragon when it comes to quality control about the braille. So we work well together.
Jeff Thompson:
You’ll never get Disney, right?
Rebecca:
Who’d wanna talk to us?
Jeff Thompson:
Isn’t that amazing? You make that phone call and what if they do say yes?
Rebecca:
I know, I know, that’s the risk, right? The only risk is that they’re gonna say yes. And it was a good risk.
Jeff Thompson:
Well there you go.
Rebecca:
Yep, pretty cool. Thank you for all your time.
Jeff Thompson:
Well thank you for coming on and you have a great day and I’ll be in touch.
Rebecca:
Okay, talk soon.
Jeff Thompson:
All right, buh-bye,
Rebecca:
Buh-bye.
Jeff Thompson:
Such a great time talking to Rebecca Blaevoet from Tactile Vision Graphics. You can check them out on the web at tactilevisiongraphics.com. And it sure is gonna be exciting when the first release of the Disney coloring books, the accessible Disney coloring books from tactilevisiongraphics.com come out. So stay tuned. And a big thank you to Chee Chau for his beautiful music. You can follow Chee Chau on Twitter @LCheeChau, Chee Chau, Chee Chau. Once again, thank you for listening, we hope you enjoyed it. And until next time, bye-bye.
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