Exploring the Universe by Touch
Noreen Grice’s Braille Astronomy Books Open Night Sky to the Blind
Oct 14, 2008
Unless viewed using special telescopes, most of the universe is invisible. Yet conceptualizing the differing wavelengths of x-rays or ultraviolet light is much easier for those who can see.
Despite astronomy’s highly visual nature, Noreen Grice, an astronomer and accessibility specialist at Boston's Museum of Science Hayden Planetarium, has created another in her series of tactile books designed especially for blind and visually impaired students.
Disappointment expressed by a group of blind students visiting the planetarium in 1984 inspired Grace to find a way to enable blind people to explore the heavens by touch. Her first book, Touch the Stars [1990] was a breakthrough of sorts in blind literacy, employing tactile images to represent constellations and the proportions and spatial relations among celestial bodies.
Grice, who founded You Can Do It Astronomy, continued the series with Touch the Universe [2002], Touch the Sun [2005], and her latest, Touch the Invisible Sky [2008], all three published as NASA braille books by Joseph Henry Press.
Tactile Illustrations Enable Blind Readers to Explore the Universe
What makes Grice’s books groundbreaking is how their innovative use of tactile representations can lead to understanding for blind readers. As the series has progressed, graphic quality has improved, from hand-carved images on plastic pages, to raised dot formations from a braille printer, to those in her latest book, which are acrylic overlays superimposed on high-contrast color images.
Grice’s books include tactile representations of:
- Constellations
- Comets
- Meteor showers
- Solar and lunar eclipses
- Moon phases
- Saturn’s Rings
- Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
- X-rays
- Infrared and ultraviolet light
- Radio and electromagnetic waves.
Noreen Grice’s Touch the Invisible Sky Illustrates What No One Can See
Grice’s latest book, Touch the Invisible Sky, takes accessible astronomy a step further with tactile illustrations of rays and light waves (using images from the Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer space telescopes) that no human can see.
The book’s multi-format construction makes it equally accessible to all readers by combining:
- Tactile diagrams, done in clear acrylic overlay, which feature raised outlines and textures superimposed on images to indicate how the objects appear with respect to wavelength
- Concise text explains what each image shows, and describes how the different types of telescopes capture the images
- Large print and high-resolution color images that can be viewed as well as felt.
On her website, Grice says, “I believe that people who read visually or by touch can learn together if science education is accessible. I am committed to creating new universally designed books, products and methods to change the way people learn!”
Touch the Invisible Sky (written with Simon Steel and Doris Daou) is funded by NASA, which is distributing free copies to U.S. schools and training centers for the blind, state libraries with astronomy collections, and the Library of Congress.
Noreen Grice Bibliography
Touch The Stars, Museum of Science, Boston, 1990, 1993, 1998
Touch The Stars II, National Braille Press, 2002
Touch The Universe: A NASA Braille Book, Joseph Henry Press, 2002
Touch The Sun, A NASA Braille Book, Joseph Henry Press, 2005
The Little Moon Phase Book, Ozone Publishing, 2005
El Pequeno Libro de las Fases de la Luna, Ozone Publishing, 2005
Touch the Invisible Sky: A Multi-Wavelength Braille Book Featuring Tactile NASA Images, Ozone Publishing, 2008
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