Cheap ‘touchable ink’ brings everything to life for visually impaired people

A map printed out using the Touchable Ink. Photo credit on all: J. Walter Thompson Bangkok.

A new invention dubbed Touchable Ink is being touted as a huge step forward for visually impaired people. The “world’s first revolutionary printing ink” allows normal printers to produce words and images that blind or low vision individuals can read by touch.

This will … revolutionize their knowledge accessibility.

The Touchable Ink dilates in certain thermal conditions, explains Satit Jantawiwat, chief creative officer at J. Walter Thompson Bangkok, one of the institutions that came up with the new ink. “This results in an embossed effect that makes the printed areas highly perceptible to the sense of touch. This innovative ink can therefore enable braille printing on normal paper through normal printers to substitute a dedicated braille embosser that is far more expensive,” he says.

“It also allows embossed printing of non-braille characters and other shapes and patterns. This will open up a new world to people with visual impairment and revolutionize their knowledge accessibility,” Satit adds.

A man reads a print-out made using Touchable Ink.

This would allow someone, for example, to print out a map of the world or a famous painting and then explore it in a tactile way.

The Bangkok creative agency shows off some of the tactile print-outs. Left to right: Sutat Pungsiripattana, vice president of Thailand Association of the Blind; Parattajariya Jalayanateja, managing director of J. Walter Thompson Bangkok; and her teammate Satit Jantawiwat, the chief creative officer.

And it’s cheaper than the usual way of making braille using a special embosser, which costs close to US$3,000, points out Dr. Nopparat Plucktaveesak, head of Department of Chemistry at Thammasat University’s Faculty of Science and Technology.

Because it works with any printer, it brings down the cost of making braille – such as this sticky label for a sauce bottle made using Touchable Ink.

Here’s a close-up of a printed page: