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Ohio's Prolific Braille Producer is Making Art More Accessible

by Amy "frankie" Felegy

Three compiled images of a Braille museum placard, a person interacting with museum portraits using audio equipment, and a table of 3D printed museum materials.
Photo Credit: Images courtesy of the Ohio Arts Council and Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Cincinnati is 123 years old. It prints close to 30 million pages of Braille every year, from Library of Congress work to commercial translation for places like Amtrak and McDonald's.

For over 120 years, Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired has helped people experience art, better.

If you’ve ever interacted with Braille, odds are the touchable code system under your fingertips was made in Ohio.

Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired is the world’s largest producer of Braille by volume. For over 120 years, it has printed Braille books for the Library of Congress, magazines, menus, and more.

For nearly a decade now, Clovernook has also worked to make the art world more accessible. 

Samual Foulkes is Clovernook’s director of Braille production and accessible innovation. He says the nonprofit has worked with hundreds of art spaces across the U.S., from the Met and Carnegie Hall to local Cincinnati museums.

“It’s an interagency group of mostly people who are blind or low vision. We work with museums to prioritize what should be made accessible, and then we produce those things,” Foulkes says.

Two men standing in front of a screen displaying "3D Printing and the Arts." One holds a 3D-printed disc, the other a 3D printed bear form. There is a table with 3D prints between them.
Photo Credit: Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Sam Foulkes, right, says talking with folks with disabilities is a good first step in making art spaces more accessible: “Once you do that, you start to see that community coming to your space.”

With grant funding, the team brings Braille, audio and touch tours, tactile graphics, 3D scans, and 3D printing into art spaces. That includes touchable replicas of opera performers or Braille stage programs. And in museums, goodbye to visual-only, 2D art behind glass.

“It seems to me that it’s often been a privilege and not a right for someone to be able to enjoy culture. And so for as long as museums have existed, they’ve traditionally been very exclusionary of people with disabilities,” Foulkes says.

Brian Anderson is Clovernook’s arts and advocacy content creator. 

He helps audit museums’ accessibility for blind and low vision visitors and conducts patron surveys on new interactive art.

“We all are artists in our own way. Everyone experiences things in a different way, even someone who may be sighted . . . And so I feel like as many ways as you can be diverse in how you offer art, or how you present art, I think that it provides a different perspective for someone to be able to experience it.”

BRIAN ANDERSON, CLOVERNOOK CENTER FOR THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED

“A staff member here who was born blind . . . said that he was discouraged from going to museums because it felt like a desert to him.” Anderson says, who was born with a visual disability. “(Diverse art portrayals) allow you to feel a part of something. Like, it allows you to feel included in what’s going on in this cultural space.”

Two people analyzing a ceramic artwork in a museum using a scanning device. A laptop on a cart shows digital results. Paintings hang in the background.
Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Clovernook’s Art and Accessibility program started in 2017.
A panel discussion taking place with six people seated on a stage. One person speaks into a microphone. Behind them, a banner says "Arts Wave" and a screen displays topics like digital accessibility and design principles. An interpreter is using sign language to the side for the audience.
Photo Credit: Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Clovernook’s Brian Anderson, right, presents at a conference. He says 3D modeling has been “a game changer for a lot of people.”
Young person in a sash and tiara, holding a children's book with an illustrated cover featuring a person who looks like them. The book is titled "Lacee Finds a Friend" and cover features a smiling person hugging an alpaca.
Photo Credit: Tiffany Wild
Kendall Wild, her county’s alpaca ambassador, wrote and published her first book through Clovernook’s publishing arm. “I want others that are reading that have disabilities to see that I didn’t let anything stop me and that they shouldn’t let anything stop them and that they should just keep achieving their dreams,” she says.
An open book featuring a hand-drawn image of a two people and three alpacas near a trailer. Text on the page includes printed and embossed braille writing. The setting is a farm, with a tree and fence in the background. The tone is calm and portrays a scene of gentle transition.
Photo Credit: Kendall Wild
Kendall Wild’s book, Lacee Finds A Friend, includes large print text, Braille, and a 3D print of the book’s alpaca star.

Clovernook also has a publishing arm, which prints Braille books that are accessible to multiple audiences. 

First-time author Kendall Wild, a high school sophomore in Canal Winchester, Ohio, published Lacee Finds A Friend through Clovernook Press in November. It’s a semi-true story about Kendall’s alpaca, who is deaf and has low vision. The book includes large-print text, Braille, and a 3D-printed alpaca.

“I wanted my book to be accessible for everyone because I have disabilities, and I want everybody, no matter what, to be able to read the book,” the 16-year-old says.

Books in multimodal formats are a strong start in normalizing Braille, Foulkes says. Everybody benefits from art advocacy.

“Creativity is a core part of existence, right? It’s how we see the world reflected around us. It’s how we can try to understand the world and understand other perspectives,” Foulkes says.

“(Art is) intrinsically human.”