These are notes from David Hawgood on the way I have produced maps of Wiltshire and Kent with Braille fonts. I started with a map of Wiltshire to be published on the GENUKI Wiltshire web pages and reproduced as a tactile map. I received help and advice from the RNIB, and particularly from Dave Gunn, Technical Manager of the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams - both in the United Kingdom. To get my map tested I contacted Royal London Society for the Blind. I amended the Wiltshire map as a result of their comments. At their request I also produced a map of Kent - because their school is in Kent, near Sevenoaks.
Some of the material which follows is very well known to anyone involved with Braille - but they are all things I have learnt while producing the maps, not having any involvement with Braille before.
The RNIB make available a Braille font which can be downloaded free of charge from their website.
The RNIB has some tactile maps available for sale. I bought one of the River Thames through London, which was in stock at the RNIB shop in Great Portland Street, London. That shop emailed me a list of other maps (in fact the list is also on the RNIB website). I bought a book of maps of the United Kingdom, which shows each county and one town in each, by splitting the UK into parts like South West England. I was recommended to provide several maps of an area, rather than trying to cram in extra information - clarity is the keyword.
The RNIB provide a service for blind people in the UK to make tactile diagrams from printed originals. The procedure is to use a cold photocopier to make a copy on "swell" paper which is impregnated with bubbles. This copy is placed under a radiant heater, the bubbles swell, and the image is raised. There are two paper sizes available, A4 and a larger one (I think it is B4). My maps are A4, and are designed to print also on letter size paper (8.5" x 11").
My advice from the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams was that Portable Data Format was most suitable, and that the html web page formats of gif was not suitable, as the Braille font would not be reproduced well. I have used CorelDraw version 5 for drawing for a few years. I bought a cut-down package Corel "Creative Essentials" including CorelDraw version 9 (reasonable price because CorelDraw is now at version 10). This includes a facility "publish to pdf" and this includes an option to embed fonts. Incidentally the maps including embedded font are small files - the one of the whole of Wiltshire is 9kb. The font is simple because it is an array of dots on a domino pattern (3 high, 2 wide), and the map is a simple drawing - it has to be for clarity.
The map has circles for towns, dotted lines for county boundaries, and continuous lines for roads. The Braille font is 24 point, and I was recommended initially that there should be a clear 6 mm around any Braille (also between other symbols), so the amount of information is quite limited. Later comments by blind users were that the braille should be closer to the circles for towns - I reduced this spacing to 3mm. My map of Wiltshire has 11 towns on it. I will go on to produce maps of different parts of Wiltshire, and each will have about ten places. The town names are shown as abbreviations, mainly two letters each - I was recommended to make them all the same length to help the user. County names are 3-letter Chapman codes. Each abbreviation is introduced by a semi-colon symbol. As the Braille abbreviations are scattered around the map, this helps the user to know where the base line of the Braille is. Incidentally, Upper case and lower case are not distinguished.
Apparently there are several ways of indicating numbers in Braille. The first ten Braille letters A to J, have all their dots in the top and second row. The RNIB font has "dropped digit", so that 1 to 0 are A to J dropped a row. The method I have used, apparently better known internationally, is to use letters A to J preceding each number by a "hash" symbol (#) which is one dot on the bottom of the left side, all three dots on the right side. To get 2 I type #B, to get 23 I type #BC.
I wanted to provide several different ways for a blind user to find any town. For one of them, I have an array of letters from top to bottom down the left hand side, and numbers across the top. This allows me to refer to any map square by a letter followed by a number. I reasoned that the natural way of feeling a map was to start at the top left, go down to the row of interest, then go across the line feeling for the Braille symbols.
I tried putting grid lines across the map, but they made it much harder to follow. Even if I used thin lines for the grid and thicker lines for the roads and boundaries, the result was a mass of intersecting lines. Initially I just marked the grid on the top and left. As a result of comments I put a wide line on alternate grid markings on the top and left, and repeated them on the bottom and right, to help in locating grid squares.
I also want to give the positions of towns by describing roads through the county. For example, the road from London to Bath entered Wiltshire at Hungerford, on through Marlborough, Chippenham, and out to Bath. On my map of the whole of Wiltshire I have just four roads - not necessarily the most major ones, but ones that conveniently join the towns. They are shown by straight lines between towns, rather than following the course of the roads.
I used the past tense when saying that the Bath Road "entered" Wiltshire at Hungerford - that used to be on the boundary but is now in Berkshire. The basis for my Wiltshire map is that in the 1835 Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England (I own a copy). I scanned the map, then in Corel Draw I traced the county boundaries and put in the towns, then I deleted the bitmap of the scan. The result is a very clear map. I put in abbreviations for place names, initially in 24 point Arial, then changed them to Braille.
Initially a place on the boundary was a large dot superimposed on the smaller dotted line. This was found to be confusing, so a place "on" a boundary is moved to be inside it, just touching.
From this basic map with Braille labels, I produced 3 variants - which will probably be used by far more people than the Braille map. One is "Large Type", with place names abbreviated as in the Braille map - I used 18 point Arial. Another is "Clear Type". Using 14 point Arial, there is room for the place names in full. On the last one, the grid lines are added as fine red lines.
My first map had a North arrow, but all my maps will have North at the top, and the arrow takes quite a lot of room, so I got rid of it. This was in accordance with advice on one of the web sites which discusses tactile maps. I also made my scale marker quite simple, just one bar with lettering against it saying "10 miles" for its total length. It was suggested to me that I could put the scale bar on a separate page with a list of symbols, but as the printing and production of raised diagrams will be done in many different ways I wanted the scale on each map.
There is a title line at the top of the map. On the Braille version this starts with a black circle, diameter the same as the height of a Braille letter, to show the orientation of the page. I then have just 26 characters available to show title, publisher, identification and version. I am using two letters as identification. One letter as version. To distinguish between the types of map, the Large type map has a letter L, Clear type has C, Clear type with Grid lines has G. The identity of Wiltshire maps starts with the county code WIL, the key to symbols starts KEY. So I have an identity like WIL-AA-a for the first version of the Braill map of Wiltshire, KEY-AA-a for its key, WIL-L-AA-a for the first version of the Lage type map of Wiltshire, WIL-C-AA-a for Clear type and WIL-G-AA-a for the one with grid lines. So my complete title, on the Braille map, is:
Wiltshire by Genuki WIL-AA-a
I have been developing the graphic, label and frame together. In fact my first frame and grid lines used the latitude and longitude lines from the original map. But my intention now is to have a standard frame as a basis. I will group this as one object in Corel Draw. For another map, I will scan it, cut out the part I want, paste it into the frame, adjust its size to fit in the frame, trace the boundaries and town positions (sometimes add roads, sometimes trace rivers), then delete the scan. Finally, add the labels.
One disadvantage of using an 1835 map is that it pre-dates the Ordnance Survey - so in fact the places are not in their precise geographic positions as found by triangulation. Originally I intended to indicate the Ordnace Survey National Grid on the map, but this doesn't work. I might start from maps based on OS triangulation in future.
I have one pdf page which is a key to symbols. This has a reference to the web address of the directory containing the Braille maps. One thing to make clear is that these are maps to support the GENUKI Wiltshire pages. Most of the explanation of the maps, including the list of abbreviations, will be text on html web pages. A blind or visually disabled user can access this in various ways - having it read out by the computer, having it printed as Braille, having it enlarged or having the colours changed for people with some vision. So I am not providing Braille text to describe the maps.
There are some choices in the CorelDraw "publish to pdf". I have chosen "embed fonts in document" for both Braille and Arial versions. I have chosen "Compression type" as "None". There are some types of pdf and I have chosen "pdf for web" - I hope this is suitable. Other choces here were "pdf to edit" or "pdf for document distribution". I have chosen "Encoding" as ASCII 85 rather than Binary. However, I find that on FTP transfer using WS_FT I have to choose "binary" rather than "ASCII".
My tactile map of Kent is based on a 1946 Ordnance Survey ten-mile road map. For the braille map this is similar to the Wiltshire map, except that the scale is shown as 10 km squares. Although not shown on the braille map, the advantage of the 1946 map is that it has the National Grid included, and I have indicated this on a large print map of Kent - which uses the same graphics for roads, towns and boundaries, but puts them in a different frame.
I will be delighted to hear from anyone else with experience of tactile maps, and particularly delighted to hear from any blind users of the maps.
31 Oct 2001, amended 20 April 2004 and validated by W3C Validator