Tactile graphics present visual information to blind and visually-impaired individuals in an accessible way, through touch. Current methods for producing tactile graphics, such as embossing or swell-paper printing, have limitations such as durability - and the tools required to produce them are limited in expressiveness. In this project, we explore embroidery as a medium for producing tactile graphics. Embroidery, traditionally known for its variety and visual beauty, offers not just improved durability and ease of production - but the ability to convey information through a broad range of stitch types. Following an exploration of the design space of embroidered tactile graphics, we identify key perceptual properties that impact how embroidered textures are differentiated. Based on these differences, we introduce an optimization algorithm for assigning textures to regions of tactile graphics in a way that makes them diverse and legible. We implement an end-to-end pipeline for producing embroidered tactile graphics and evaluate the comprehensibility and legibility of our design with 6 blind participants. Our findings showed that embroidered tactile graphics present information accurately and comprehensively, and that measurable properties, such as the use of spacing and distinctiveness, were an important factor of expressive and legible design.

For non-technical domain experts and designers it can be a substantial challenge to create designs that meet domain specific goals. This presents an opportunity to create specialized tools that produce optimized designs in the domain. However, implementing domain-specific optimization methods requires a rare combination of programming and domain expertise. Creating flexible design tools with re-configurable optimizers that can tackle a variety of problems in a domain requires even more domain and programming expertise. We present OPTIMISM, a toolkit which enables programmers and domain experts to collaboratively implement an optimization component of design tools. OPTIMISM supports the implementation of metaheuristic optimization methods by factoring them into easy to implement and reuse components: objectives that measure desirable qualities in the domain, modifiers which make useful changes to designs, design and modifier selectors which determine how the optimizer steps through the search space, and stopping criteria that determine when to return results. Implementing optimizers with OPTIMISM shifts the burden of domain expertise from programmers to domain experts.

The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange is a public, open-source repository for 3D printable medical device designs with contributions from clinicians, expert-amateur makers, and people from industry and academia. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NIH formed a collection to foster submissions of low-cost, locally manufacturable personal protective equipment (PPE) . We evaluated the 623 submissions in this collection to understand: what makers contributed, how they were made, who made them, and key characteristics of their designs. We found an immediate design convergence to manufacturing-focused remixes of a few initial designs affiliated with NIH partners and major for-profit groups. The NIH worked to review safe, effective designs but was overloaded by manufacturing-focused design adaptations. Our work contributes insights into: the outcomes of distributed, community-based medical making; the features that the community accepted as “safe” making; and how platforms can support regulated maker activities in high-risk domains.

Tactile maps can help people who are blind or have low-vision navigate and familiarize themselves with unfamiliar locations. Ideally, tactile maps can be customized to an individual’s unique needs and abilities because of their limited space for representation. We present Maptimizer, a tool that generates tactile maps based on users’ preferences and requirements. Maptimizer uses a two stage optimization process to pair representations with geographic information and tune those representations to present that information more clearly. In a small user study, Maptimizer helped participants more successfully and efficiently identify locations of interest in unknown areas. These results demonstrate the utility of optimization techniques and generative design in complex accessibility domains.