Tactile Media Alliance
ABIGALE: Hi, my name is Abigale Stangl, and I'm here to talk to you about the Tactile Media Alliance. The Tactile Media Alliance is a network of people invested in creating, designing, producing and teaching with Tactile Graphics and Tactile Art. The Tactical Media Alliance was formed by Ann Cunningham, who's a tactile artist and author, as well as myself, who is an academic researcher in the field of human-computer interaction and accessibility. Our goal is to create a community of practice. We're a distributed learning community with members who have a common interest in creating and producing Tactile Media and where we can share information and experiences with one another to facilitate professional and personal development in this field. So currently on our website, we offer resource lists around Tactile Media creation and production, an Atlas with existing Tactile Media Alliance members, and we hope to create member spotlights where we can talk about the practices that you're engaged in and learn from each other around what's successful. And we also hope to do that through a podcast. So let's visit tactile.abigalestangl.com where the Tactile Media Alliance is currently hosted. So when you get to this website, the Tactile Media Alliance website, we'll go to the resource tab first. Here we see we have Tactile Media repositories listed, Tactile Media design guidelines, Tactile Media production tools, Tactile Media curriculum. We also have this Community Atlas. So for example, let's go to Colorado where I'm currently located. Here, we see that there are four members, Tactile Media Alliance members, who have shared their information about what they're doing, what they're working on. We see that one person is involved with creating signage, accessible signage. Other people are interested in creating Tactile Art or Tactile Graphics for STEM learning. Here, let's go to Indonesia where we have a member who is looking at how to build resources for their community to serve people who are blind. On this site, we also have a map with other resources available that are tangential to Tactile Media production and creation. For example, here we see all the libraries in the United States that have Tactile learning materials for people who are blind. Unfortunately, we only have data from the United States right now, and so, we invite you to participate to create more information about the Tactile Media resources in your communities. I also want to show you our community survey, which is where we invite you to become a member of the Tactile Media Alliance, where you'll answer a few questions about who you are, what your experience is, what resources you use as a Tactile Media creator, producer and reader. And I just want to highlight that we won't share your information publicly on the website unless you give us permission to do that. So I invite you to join the Tactile Media Alliance by visiting tactile.abigalestangl.com, thank you.