1. PREAMBLE

Quite a number of learned articles have been written on relief representations for the blind, but on the May 1988 Stockholm Conference I gathered no comprehensive shop-floor manual was available. So I figured an accessible translation of the manual I'd written in Dutch might come in useful to the workers in this field.
This rewrite into English is the manual's fourth edition: in every edition the general rules expand at the examples' expense, which of course is as it should be in a field as young as this. I guess development still has a long course to run ...

This manual is based on the work I've done at the Netherlands Library for Audio Books and Braille, which was almost exclusively on books for secondary schools. I have never occupied myself with mobility maps, and I think they're entirely different from my kind of relief drawings.

My graphics are put into relief on the stereo paper produced by Matsumoto, Osaka. As this paper has a finer grain, or is more sensitive than the Swedish product, it allows for stronger contrasts, like fine dots and thin lines next to solid black areas: it is more versatile. It's also more expensive, though, and unfortunately less pleasant to the touch too.

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© 1989, 2002 Marco Schuffelen All rights reserved


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Last modified: Thu May 15 10:23:49 PDT 1989