How Tactile Graphics Are Transforming Assessment Accessibility

I've spent the better part of my career thinking about what inclusive accessibility really means—not just technical compliance, not a checkbox, but genuine, meaningful access to learning. That belief is personal to me. I was a student on an IEP myself who received pull-out services in elementary school, and those experiences gave me an early, up-close understanding of what it feels like when systems aren't designed with individuals with disabilities in mind. Ensuring inclusive learning experiences and accessibility for every student isn't just a professional mission for me—it's personal.

Later, I spent nearly a decade volunteering and eventually leading programming at an organization serving students with a wide variety of disabilities. It's where I developed a holistic view of disability lived experiences and the conviction that one person's experience is just that, one person's experience. I believe in the social model of disability: barriers don’t exist within individuals; they exist within systems and environments that weren't designed for everyone. 

That belief drives our accessibility work at Curriculum Associates and is shared by our broader accessibility team composed of individuals with a variety of disability lived experiences. It's what led us to one of the most meaningful projects our team has taken on to date.

The Reality We Were Called to Address

Close to 55,000 students across US schools are legally blind and depend on specialized formats like tactile graphics and braille to engage with grade-level content. And hundreds of thousands more live with vision loss who may benefit from richer, more tactile ways of interacting with visual information. For these kids, a geometry figure or a data chart isn’t just a test question that can’t be sufficiently described through alternative text—it’s a real barrier standing between them and an accurate measure of what they know. 

For years, our adaptive assessment has flagged those items with a note: see your educator for a tactile graphic. The adaptivity of our test is critical to deliver on our promise of pinpointing each student’s individual skills and needs to drive instruction. It also means that teachers have no way of knowing in advance what items or graphics will be on each student’s assessment. We know in theory that skipping items or reducing adaptivity and accuracy for specific students wasn’t the right solution. But in practice, teachers had to scramble, mid-assessment, to create a tactile representation from scratch.

We’ve built systems to receive and aggregate feedback from teachers and students on the accessibility of our assessment, and the impact of this challenge became a clear theme. We knew we had to do better.

As a result, we engaged with teachers of students with visual impairments (TVIs) and students who are blind or have low vision (B/LV) who agreed that tactile access to graphics, combined with the power of a computer-adaptive test, would provide clear insights into a student’s knowledge of critical constructs. 

Partnering with the American Printing House for the Blind

At first, we developed a short-term solution—detailed guidance co-created in collaboration with TVIs using our assessment and members of our team who have lived experience as students who leveraged tactiles and as a TVI. This resource helps teachers know the types of items by grade band and item type that will require a tactile and suggests materials to have on hand to speed up production. It helped. But it wasn't good enough.

A long-term solution required a partner who could bring something we couldn't build alone: deep, specialized expertise in tactile graphics, braille standards, and assistive technology at scale. That's what brought us to the American Printing House for the Blind (APH).

APH is the world's largest nonprofit organization creating educational materials for people who are blind or have low vision. Their credibility in this space spans more than 160 years. When Curriculum Associates and APH aligned on a shared mission, first at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in 2023, I knew this was the partnership that could move our industry forward.

Over the next 18+ months, our teams—tactile graphic artists, assessment content experts, assistive technology users, and former TVIs—built a custom tactile graphics library comprising more than 4,000 images, supporting multiple braille codes, languages, and embossing technologies. Graphics were tested and refined with experts, educators, and students at every step. The result isn't just a library. It's a quality standard. And it was built with and by the people it's meant to serve.

Where We're Headed—Continuing to Improve Accessibility

For 2026, TVIs will be able to provide students with standardized, ready-to-emboss tactile materials on demand—in a fraction of the time it currently takes, and with the consistency and quality students deserve. That's meaningful progress.

But we're also building toward something bigger.

I remember seeing the Monarch for the first time—a dynamic braille computer developed by APH in partnership with HumanWare and the National Federation of the Blind. Unlike traditional, single-line braille displays, the Monarch renders both braille copy and tactile graphics simultaneously on a large, refreshable surface. So instead of waiting for paper embossing or navigating around a visual they can't access, a student can explore a spatial diagram or read a graph in real time. It's a genuine leap forward, and it's exactly the kind of technology this tactile graphics library was built to support in the future.

That mission has guided everything we've built with APH—design for where classrooms are today, with an eye toward where technology is taking us.

Why True Assessment Accessibility Means Raising the Bar

Students who are BLV are regularly denied access to the assessment moments that tell us what they know and can do. Teachers have a right to accurate data about all their students. Some approaches to this problem involve removing the constructs that are hardest to make accessible—geometry, graphs, highly visual math—or removing adaptivity for students who need tactile support by relying on fixed form. I understand the logic. But I knew we could do better. 

If we lower expectations for certain constructs for certain students, we will lower outcomes—and we will narrow opportunities. It's what the evidence shows, and it's what the educators we work with tell us every day. That is unacceptable. I think regularly about the students I worked with—the ones whose potential was never the question, but whose access to opportunities often was. This work is for them. And for every student sitting at a desk right now, waiting for a chance to show what they know. They deserve better. We can do better. And with the right partnerships and the right technology, we finally are.

Want to learn more? Check out our accessibility whitepaper.

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