Touching and Feeling the Data: A Reusable Software Pipeline for Tactile Statistical Graphs in Accessible Education
2026-07-01 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created software that helps make 3D printed tactile graphs faster and easier for blind or low vision students to use. Their program automatically figures out how to design the graphs based on touch research, builds common chart types like bar and line graphs, and can even read charts from images with teacher approval. This system turns charts into 3D-print ready files very quickly, solving the problem of manually creating each graph in complicated design software. They explain how the software works, how well it performs, and its current limits.
3D printingtactile graphsvisualizationhaptic interactionCAD softwareJavaScriptStandard Tessellation Languagelarge language modelsstatistical chartsmulti-modal AI
Authors
Lawrence Obiuwevwi, Krzysztof J. Rechowicz, Jessica M. Johnson, Erika Frydenlund, Vikas Ashok, Sachin Shetty, Sampath Jayarathna
Abstract
Statistical visualization is usually treated as a visual medium, but data can also be touched. Three dimensional printed tactile graphs let blind and low vision students feel distributions, trace trends, and explore relationships through direct haptic interaction. Yet classroom scale use remains limited because producing each graph in CAD software requires specialized skill and hours of manual work. We address this bottleneck as a software problem through a three layer reusable pipeline in about 1500 lines of JavaScript. The first layer derives tactile design parameters automatically from plate dimensions using tactile perception research. The second provides shared chart scaffolding and five modular builders for scatter, bar, histogram, line, and box plots. The optional third layer uses a multi-modal large language model to extract structured chart specifications from uploaded images, with mandatory teacher review before print generation. The pipeline produces print ready binary Standard Tessellation Language files in under 250 milliseconds. We present the design, performance, and limitations.