From Anonymous Shapes to Named Places: A Tool for Braille and Place-Semantic Annotation of Tactile Maps

Abstract

On a 3D-printed tactile map, a building felt under the finger is an anonymous shape: touch alone cannot tell which footprint is which, and a spoken description cannot reliably point to one shape at one place. We present a web-based tool that lets a sighted helper click to add on-shape Braille labels to an already-generated map model, downstream of the geometry generator so that whoever knows the reader and the local Braille standard does the labeling. The tool offers click-based OpenStreetMap matching, hand-editable abbreviation that shrinks a name to fit a footprint, and print-safe dot geometry with a review step that catches anomalies before printing. We demonstrate it on five printed maps of different place types, from a downtown core to a college campus and a small dining mall. In formative sessions in which ten BLV readers compared an unlabeled print with an annotated one, four read Braille fluently, so we treat Braille as one output among several rather than the only one. The tool's core is the link between coordinates, geometry, and a place's semantics, which can drive an audio readout or a non-Braille code. The tool is available at https://leolee7.github.io/Annotate_Braille/.