Benefits of Art Education for People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired
Tools of Art Education for People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired
The benefits of art education for people who are blind or visually impaired are largely the same as those for sighted people. Sighted and blind people alike benefit from the critical thinking skills, language skills, cooperative learning, and general life enrichment provided by studying art history. Art making can serve to foster sensory awareness, manual dexterity, self-confidence, and self-awareness. Children of all ages benefit from academic curricula enhanced by the teaching of aesthetics, art making, art history, and art criticism.
Among the benefits unique to blind individuals are braille reading skills, mobility and map-reading skills, and tactile exploration skills, all of which contribute significantly to a blind person's success in a sighted world. Being versed in and contributing to visual culture helps blind people to break through social barriers and increases confidence.
Pictorial literacy is a concept not everyone recognizes, but which plays a crucial role in everyday life. Consider how much more difficult it is for blind people to learn biology without having a diagram of the heart, or to memorize the location of each state of the United States when provided only with an educator's verbal description of the map. Sighted people have access to a wealth of pictorial information: they form image banks containing images and symbols, from road signs to the Egyptian pyramids. We would like to introduce pictorial literacy to people who are blind by teaching them to use and create tactile images. Blind people are able to understand visual information through touch and sound, and these learning tools need to be made available to them.
ABS has been trailblazing a way for pictorial literacy by creating a complete tactile encyclopedia of images of famous art works and architectural monuments, Art History through Touch and Sound.
Some of the art tools used by people who are blind include:
- Raised-line drawing boards
- Very useful, even for children with minimal to no experience drawing.
- Pencils and crayons
- Students use one hand to draw and the other to mark for themselves the beginning and ends of forms
- Salt, sand, seeds, and rice
- Carefully acclimate students to experience
- Students can explore differences between dry and damp material
- Glue
- Squeeze from tube to create raised lines/textures
- Wikki Stix
- Used in conjunction with mesh screen surface
The above information is derived from Art Beyond Sight: A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual Impairment.
