Blind-led tactile art education, creative access, and embodied learning.

Tactile Art Collective

Who are We? The TA C! We are blind, low-vision, and sighted artists and allies devoted to teaching tactile art, tactile graphics, and creative image-making to blind and low-vision kids and adults.

Our work fights Image Poverty one tactile drawing, folded sculpture, raised line, coded SVG, print, and shared workshop table at a time.

Recognized for Tactile Art Education

The Tactile Art Collective is honored to receive the 2026 Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind. This recognition supports our work teaching tactile drawing, tactile graphics, creative technology, and embodied art practices with blind and low-vision learners.

Creative Access Starts With Making

Tactile art is not a substitute for visual art. It is a rich creative practice with its own tools, techniques, aesthetics, and incorporates tactile discovery to boost graphicacy and tactile literacy.

Built Around Blind Experience

Our curriculum centers nonvisual exploration, touch, spatial reasoning, description, collaboration, and the practical joy of making images that can be understood through touch.

What We Teach

Our teaching grows from hands-on instruction, blind-led experimentation, and materials that make art approachable without requiring sight as the default path into understanding.

Approximate Perspective

Spatial drawing concepts for understanding scale, placement, depth, and relationships through tactile and verbal instruction.

Tactile Drawing

Raised-line drawing with tools such as the Sensational Blackboard or other tactile drawing surfaces, rooting artistic learning and basics through standard copy paper and ballpoint pens.

Origami and Sculpture

Three-dimensional art practices that build touch vocabulary, sequencing, form, structure, and creative confidence.

SVG Coding

Nonvisual graphics creation through code, supporting tactile diagrams, digital graphics, and more precise tactile image production.

Fabrication

3D printing, UV printing, embossing, and other production workflows for creating tactile and multimodal materials.

Art Room Practices

Conference and community art-room teaching across tactile drawing, coloring, paper craft, sculpture, and creative technology.

Workshops, Teach-ins, and Art Rooms

TAC can support schools, libraries, museums, blindness organizations, conferences, and local communities that want tactile art instruction led by people who understand blind and low-vision learning from the inside.

Possible Formats

  • Introductory tactile drawing sessions
  • Approximate perspective workshops
  • Origami, sculpture, and tactile coloring activities
  • SVG coding sessions for tactile and digital graphics
  • Multi-day Art Room programming for conferences and events

Who We Work With

  • Blind and low-vision students and adults
  • Families, teachers, TVIs, community educators, and access professionals
  • Museums, libraries, and community art spaces
  • Blindness Organizations and allies.

Resources

This area will grow into a library of curriculum, tools, examples, and recommended materials. For now, these are strong starting points.

BlindSVG

Nonvisual graphics creation with SVG code.

Ann Cunningham's Sensational Books

Home of the Sensational Blackboard and tactile art resources.

InsightAble Puzzles by Maureen Handwerker

3D-printed and magnetic tactile puzzles.

BTactile

A tactile graphics metalibrary for finding tactile graphics resources.

Tactile Graphics Image Library (TGIL)

A searchable image library for tactile graphics.

TADA Curriculum

Tactile Art & Design Adventures curriculum from the Washington State School for the Blind.

Meet the Instructors

The collective includes artists, educators, designers, technologists, access workers, and tactile-graphics practitioners. More complete bios will be added as the site grows.

Ann Cunningham

Artist, educator, tactile art leader, and creator of the Sensational Blackboard.

Chancey Fleet

Specialties: Assistive tech, origami, tactile drawing, keeping people on task.

Materials Taught: Tactile drawing, origami, approximate perspective, 3D printing, tactile graphics.

Chancey Fleet is the Assistive Technology Coordinator for the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library of the NYPL. She is a blind accessibility advocate, designer, National Federation of the Blind leader, and Brooklyn resident.

Ka Li

Specialties: Tactile design, instruction engineering, UV printing, 3D printing, Legos.

Materials Taught: Approximate perspective, tactile drawing, fabrication, Lego builds.

Marco Salsiccia

Specialties: Tactile drawing, sculpture, SVG coding, embossing, digital and tactile graphics.

Materials Taught: Beginner, intermediate, and advanced tactile drawing, sculpture, approximate perspective, SVG coding, digital and tactile graphics production.

Marco was an animator and a visual FX artist, working in the Motion Graphics industry for 14 years before losing his vision in 2014. He now works as an accessibility consultant and expert for various companies around the Bay Area in California. He loves both introducing and reconnecting students to art no matter where they are on their journey into art and design.

Minh Ha

Specialties: Tactile coloring, origami, tactile texturing

Materials Covered: Coloring, tactile drawing, origami, crafting

Minh works at Perkins School for the Blind, and loves to tie her artistic work and teaching in with the mental health benefits that come along with creativity.

Karen Anderson

Specialties: Tactile drawing, facilitation, art program organization, logistics

Materials Covered: Tactile drawing, art concepts and techniques, Art Room setup and logistics, advocacy

Instructor profile coming soon.

Danielle Montour Lane

Specialties: Tactile art techniques, curriculum development, emotional support and guidance

Materials Covered: Instructional and emotional management, tactile art and approximate perspective techniques

Instructor profile coming soon.

Shelly Smith

Specialties: Art Room facilitation, tactile mapmaking, inclusive instruction, logistics, emotional support and guidance

Materials Taught: Tactile maps, tactile drawing, origami, sculpture, textured and mixed-media art, Art Room setup and facilitation

Shelly Smith is a blind educator, tactile learning facilitator, and accessibility advocate who creates welcoming spaces where confidence grows through doing. She brings warmth, humor, practical problem-solving, and a talent for keeping things moving to hands-on learning. Shelly enjoys helping people explore new materials, ask “What happens if…?” and discover what they can do. If she does not know the answer, she will gladly help find it.

Kaiti Shelton

Specialties: Tactile drawing, origami, Flip Pics, Emotional support and processing, adaptation and accommodation for multiple disabilities and youth.

Materials Taught: Sensational Blackboard drawing, origami, tactile or textured art materials, Flip Pics.

Kaiti Shelton, MT-BC, is a blind creative from Saint Paul Minnesota. A board-certified music therapist by day, she is passionate about increasing accessibility to and representation of disabled people of all ages and abilities in the arts. Kaiti was a community educator participant in the 2025 Tactile Art Teach-In in Denver, and joined the teaching team in 2026.

Connect With TAC

We are shaping this site while the collective keeps teaching, experimenting, and planning what comes next. To ask about workshops, Art Room programming, curriculum, or collaborations, email [email protected].

For now, this first version gives us a place to start drawing the public shape of the collective.