Visually impaired people to touch museum artifacts

ESKİŞEHİR - Anadolu Agency

Thanks to a project developed by academics at Anadolu University in the Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir, significant artifacts in museums around the world have been materialized with 3D printers for the benefit of visually impaired people.

The artifacts are also presented with introduction cards written using the Braille alphabet. Academics Özlem Yiğit, Hıdır Karaduman and Ümran Alan decided to make a work helping visually impaired people’s interpretation of historic artifacts.

The project is based on a global project called “Scan the World,” in which museums across the world scanned their best known artifacts and put them into the digital environment. The Anadolu University academics decided to bring these artifacts to life in Turkey by using 3D scanning.

“We have named our work ‘The 3D Printed Artifacts Museum’ and we attended the White Cane Festival last year at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. We have so far taken some 30 artifacts in our project to visually impaired people, explaining the artifacts using introduction cards in Braille alphabet and audio descriptions,” said Karaduman.

“Museums are often meaningless, dark and boring places for the visually impaired. They have very limited opportunities in many world museums to touch artifacts. With our project, visually impaired people have the chance to touch artifacts and understand them better. We have made the museums accessible for them,” he added.