A Research of Tactile Recognition on 2D and 3D Shapes Among Students in Junior and Senior High Schools With Visual Impairment 

Abstract: In the tactile recognition research of people with visual impairment (VIP), there are a lot of researches investigating the impact of tactile shape design towards the performance of identification during the conceptual identification stage. However, the tactile shapes used on the researches above are mostly designed by the stereotype towards objects that people without visual impairment can see. The research randomly sampled 6 subjects, asked them to draw 24 shapes or patterns that they use daily, and then applied the characteristics of the shapes and patterns on tactile shapes for them to perform recognition experiments. The results show that a certain percentage of the blind subjects are able to identify the geometric characteristics on the shapes if using the shapes designed with the drawing characteristics by VIP for identification. Nevertheless, the correct identification rate in their responses to find out the differences in details is still low. As for the vision of angle and the subjects’ congenital conditions, the differences in the identification rate are similar with that from other researchers. The correct identification rate in 2D is higher than 3D while those who are late blind are relatively higher than those who are early blind.

Key words: tactile picture recognition; visual impairment; textured picture

JEL code: I0