Children with visual impairments read a tactile book from the team at Nguyen Dinh Chieu, a school for children with visual impairments, in Hanoi. (Photo: thanhnienviet.vn) The programme was co-organised by the Ministry of Education and Training andthe Central Committee of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union.
Thanh said normal children are familiar with books from a very young age,helping them prepare for learning how to read.
Children with visual impairments also need to be familiar with tactile books tohelp develop skills, thereby being ready to learn Braille, she said.
“There were no made-in-Vietnam tactile books until us, so blind children have tobegin to learn how to read Braille without having experience with tactilebooks,” she said.
“Without these experiences, children lack the discovery and joy of reading,”she said.
Thanh and Hang, with the support of Louise France, a British expert, who has 20years of experience teaching children with visual impairments in the UnitedKingdoms, have researched and developed made-in-Vietnam tactile books forchildren with visual impairments with the hope to provide them with a tool topractice tactile skills to learn Braille more easily.
Tactile books
Tactile books, having five to 10 pages, are specially designed and completelyhandmade on thick canvas or cardboard, she said.
They are designed with small objects and patterns attached to fabric pages, creatingimages, which can be felt by touch. The tactile pages have both printed andBraille text so that normal people could also read, she said.
The book is divided into four levels: A, B, C, D.
Level A is the easiest level, with tactile books using real objects attached tothe pages of the book, along with familiar tunes for visually impaired childrento touch and feel.
At level B, books present poems and stories, using simple tactile pictures andmodels. At level C, books present simple stories, using complex tactilepictures. At this level, the images have more complex symbols such as trees andmotorbikes.
The most difficult is level D, the books present stories about the worldoutside the child's experience, using complex tactile pictures.
Children's books have to be suitable for children's psychology at all ages,Thanh said.
The team wrote their own stories or adapted them from published children'sstories. For the adaptation, the team had to contact the author for permission.When adapting content to fit tactile books, the consent of the writers mustalso be obtained, she said.
Thanh said making a tactile book is difficult because, in addition to thestory, it needs also images sewn onto the pages.
Visually impaired children will read books by touch. The more developed thechild's touching skills, the greater the ability to visualise to understand thestory and the messages from life through the pages of the book, she said.
Therefore, Thanh and her teammates had to spend many years researching tounderstand the levels of touch ability of visually impaired children, therebydesigning different books for children of different levels.
"Before us, no one in Vietnam has researched and made tactile books, sorelevant documents were not available in Vietnamese,” she said.
They had to research by foreign documents, she said.
Seeking support
After five years of research, experimentation and making the books, Thanh’steam and volunteers have only made 50 tactile books, partly because of theCOVID-19 pandemic. Besides, making a tactile book requires meticulousness sothey could not make them fast.
Normally, they need two weeks to make a tactile book, she said.
Thanh and her teammates have contacted a number of deaf people to hire to sewpictures for the books.
Thanh said deaf people are very skilful, so, they can help to make the tactilebooks faster.
After finishing the books, Thanh needed the first evaluation, so she contactedparents whose children are visually impaired, to send them books for thechildren to use and make assessments.
At first, some parents were not keen, but the team never gave up.
“We persuaded them day after day,” she said.
Then, parents who witnessed their children reading the tactile books andchanging every day started to think differently and began enthusiasticallysupporting the team, she said.
Thanh said she and her team have planned to establish a library of tactilebooks for children with visual impairments this year.
The library will have a space for children with visual impairments to read onsite. Children can also borrow books to read at home, she said.
Moreover, Thanh said she and her team also wrote detailed instructions on howto make a tactile book so that schools for children with visual impairments canmake their own books for their students.
Associate Professor Nguyen Xuan Thanh, head of the Secondary EducationDepartment under the Ministry of Education and Training told Tuoi Tre (Youth)newspaper that he highly appreciates the idea of making the first made-in-Vietnamtactile books for children with visual impairments.
Thanh also praised the way that the team provided instructions on how to make atactile book, so that schools for children with visual impairments can maketheir own books for their students./.
VNA
