Swell Paper

We have been looking at the relationship between touch and sight in some of the level 4 sessions. I was doing some research into how people with sight impairment could read diagrams and discovered that there is such a thing as ‘swell paper’. Swell paper offers an interesting solution to the problem of making drawings in shallow relief so I thought it worth a post. 

Look carefully and you can see how the surface is raised underneath the black areas.

This technique was designed for drawing raised diagrams and probably works at its best when using clean sharp images and thick lines. There are several different makes of swell-paper, sometimes called capsule paper, puff paper or fuser paper, available, the trade names include Tangible Magic Paper, Matsumoto, ZyTex and Flexi-Paper. Some need more heat than others to raise lines and like any other material you need to work with it to find out its full potential. Ask for free samples of paper from suppliers, and of course test, test, test. 

For papers that will work on a photocopier I have seen good recommendations for Tangible Magic Paper.

Because black photocopier and laser printer toner is carbon, these two devices can produce wonderful images for tactile graphics. However, they both have very hot internal parts, and it can cause a very bad paper jam if you attempt to print or copy onto swell paper without taking a few precautions first:

1: Always pass your swell-paper through the manual feed of the unit, one sheet at a time;

2: Try to use the copier or printer just after it has been switched on from cold, or after it has been idle for long enough to cool down. Never use it immediately after a large print or copy run, because the swell-paper can swell in the high-temperature environment inside the unit, and cause a very serious paper jam. I.e. keep it cool and don’t try and put several sheets through one after the other, because the machine will get too hot. Zychem Ltd. supply specialist heaters for work with their swell paper, but you can also e mail files to them for printing on non standard sizes. From what I have seen the images made from their dedicated machines are very good. 

Web links

For Zytex swell paper and specialist heating machines from Zychem click here

A useful video here can help you to think about how an image should be simplified before being translated into a black and white line diagram.

www.tactilegraphics.org- a collection of resources for people doing tactile graphics. There is an excellent Decision Tree linked from the front page. This might be for graphic designers, but it is also a useful guide for when thinking about whether or not a drawing would work as a shallow relief. Lech Kolasiński has made five adaptations of paintings by Jacek Malczewski. The image below, ‘Tickled to Death’ is divided into two longitudinal halves, each of the re-interpretations is a reconstruction of the original, in the upper section we have a simplification of the composition, while in the lower part an interpretation of the meaning of the image, which is simplified and so clearer to the blind. Both images are raised using swell paper to provide a heightened tactile experience. 

See also:

Drawing as a trace of a touch

Cross contour drawing

To touch is to believe