Children’s book for blind and visually impaired children

In order for the book to be suitable for blind and visually impaired children, numerous design and technical print-related issues had to be resolved, such as the ideal book format for children’s hands, the typesetting, the illustrations and the haptic elements. The final version of the book design was created after talking to children from the Sonnenberg School for the Blind in Baar.

The haptic elements were printed with UV curable inks and inkjet printing technology. Thin layers of ink are printed one on top of the other and cured with UV light. The relief structures can be very fine, reaching a height of up to 0.5 mm.

The inks for the haptic elements must pose zero risk to health and comply with the standards for children’s books. In addition, because the clear lacquer layers, which are up to 0.5 mm thick, can have a strong yellowing effect, the 3D prints were artificially aged for 180 hours in a xenon test chamber under simulated sunlight. Only one ink was found to be acceptable for the book in terms of yellowing.

The prototype of the children’s book was printed at the institute on a specially developed laboratory printer equipped with two Ricoh Gen 5 print heads and a TTP printing system. The 3D information was represented in a PNG greyscale image. White represents a height of 0 mm and black a height of 0.5 mm.

The book was printed at Vögeli AG Marketingproduktion & Druck on a Scodix Sense Digital Press. In this process, the height information in the design programme was sliced into a total of seven layers and saved in separate PDF files. During printing, the files were loaded and printed one after the other at the appropriate layer height.

Result

The children’s book ‘Mouse Mici falls into the pantry’ was published by the Institute for Print Technology in an edition of 70 copies (ISBN 978-3-033-04969-7).