Tactile graphics on MacOS with a braille embosser

This doesn't address your problem directly, but I'm posting it here as a reference.

After months waiting, a few weeks ago the ZyFuse swell embosser that I ordered finally arrived. This is not a Braille embosser, although it can emboss Braille just fine if I print the dots on paper, but its main function is to emboss very detailed tactile graphics. The way it works is I just print whatever I want on proprietary paper sheets using a regular printer, a laser printer in my case, then I feed the sheet to the embosser, and whatever is darkened in the printed image is swollen by the embosser thus creating the tactile graphics, with darker parts getting more pronounced swelling. Drawing with a marker or even a roller ball pen also works, and even very detailed fine-grained textures that feel like sandpaper can be embossed. The embosser itself does not require and does not actually have any way to connect it to a computer, which also means that it doesn't need drivers or specific operating systems to operate, and that was definitely a huge selling point for me.

One problem that I found, however, is that Safari does not handle printing SVG very well, so images end up getting cropped, sometimes severely. However I haven't spent much time figuring out a workflow yet so I might end up finding a solution or implementing one myself at some point in the future.

Wait, wait, wait. You purchased a machine that is not IOT compatible?
Say it isn't so?! 😱

I've done some designs using openscad. Compared with the cost of the swell paper it is actually cheaper to print out a scaled down version of the model you've designed. There is also the option of compressing the Z axis if you want a flattened version of the design.

I agree, there should be a quicker and les wasteful way of checking designs before printing, but 3d printers are fairly fast these days. I've got the Bambu P2S and X1C.

If you want to talk about 3D printing, accessibility and issues with using IOS and Mac to run the printers, drop me a line. I've been through most FDM machines including Ender, Prusa and a Voron. None of which are particularly blind friendly, taking a lot of trial and error and problem solving, but happy to pass on what I've learned.

There are of course, other safety issues we need to consider too.

I am wondering, as a basic means of verification if we could create an app that lets you 'feel' the outline of a 2D object using haptics, IE, haptics when you're touching within the boundaries of the object, and no haptics when moved beyond.

I do wish graphical interfaces weren't so damn expensive. I'd love to get my hands on a load of maps without having to 2d or 3d print them.

And the Graphiti, is only £18000 if you don't pay VAT, which you won't.... Buy two!

Wait, wait, wait. You purchased a machine that is not IOT compatible?

Yes, it only has an on-off switch and a knob to control how much heat is applied to the sheets and thus how pronounced the swelling ends up being, nothing else. It's also made of hard metal with sharp corners, and feels like hardware from the 80s, or a battle tank, and the only port on it is for the power cord. There's a paper tray on the front, made of the same metal as the rest of the case, which can either take A3 sheets in a vertical orientation or A4 sheets in a horizontal orientation, and the paper comes out through a slit on the opposite side, falling down on whatever happens to be behind. It's a rather crude machine, but does it's job well.

I am wondering, as a basic means of verification if we could create an app that lets you 'feel' the outline of a 2D object using haptics, IE, haptics when you're touching within the boundaries of the object, and no haptics when moved beyond.

I have considered doing so before ordering my embosser, but quickly realized that it would not work since even with haptic feedback it becomes quite hard to tell the direction of the stroke, which at least I find important. I can still write something for iOS, or maybe even try to find a way to repurpose the trackpad on macOS for people to experiment with that yourselves, but I don't think it will be very useful.

When I output SVGs to my ViewPlus Delta, I just treat it like a printer and send the files directly to it by printing from Safari, Chrome, or Preview. Have you tried that using the latest MacOS Index printer drivers?

I also have a lot of information about outputting SVG and rasterizing images for tactile format output on my BlindSVG site: BlindSVG Output and Embossing

In the 80s, there was some sort of... bake and puff paper that you ran through the copy machines and worked just like what João Santos describes, and it may be the same stuff. It sounds like you can get a crisper resolution now because the braille came out weak back then. This was a gadget a blind school might have, and probably not an individual, in most cases.
Still too rich for my budget, and what I'm working on.
Later in college, I took a ribbon-style, dot matrix printer and rigged it up to scratch the paper, and it was enough to study the shapes of fonts, one or two letters at a time, scaled up and in bold. That's about all I did with it before the pins started failing. Might have worked for pictures if I had experimented more with delicate paper or something.
Now, I just find someone who likes tracing things, like adult coloring books, and give them a mirror printout with one of those raised line frames.
I use the heck out of Seeing AI's explore function for pictures. Not quite haptic, and very vague about what it recognizes, but still useful. You have to do a lot of guesswork on where the edges of the image are, and go back to ask a lot of questions.
It would be nice to look at the layout on a quick printout when I'm doing a collage, instead of trying to rely only on the math, and asking AI about the white space or borders.

Yeah, we talked about this briefly on reddit, where I post as Fridux. I did skim over your website, and then replied back to you some time later, but the cropping problem that I'm facing, which sometimes is so bad that only a tiny portion of the SVG is printed out, happens on currentSafari with Apple's own AirPrint and USB drivers for my Brother printer, which work well in every other case. Also just telling the system to print to a PDF instead results in parts of the image getting cropped as well, so I have little reason to doubt the quality of the drivers or the printer itself.

While writing an earlier comment to this thread, the possibility that Safari could just be covering the edges of the sheet with some kind of white margin crossed my mind, since the viewport of the SVG that I was drawing had just enough room for the whole logo. This might be causing Safari to render it in one of the corners of the sheet resulting in parts of the image getting cropped by the aforementioned white margins. I have a few housekeeping tasks to finish now, but will investigate this possibility once I'm done and report on the results.

Man, this is in my purchase list since like 2 years for literally the exact reasons you mentioned! Gonna buy PIAF from Humanware soon. Thank you for a short email exchange with a guy at blind SVG.
My plan was to use it with SVGs too, thanks for letting me know about problems in Safari.
Also if somebody can try freeform with this thing... :) Will unicode braille do the trick for labeling, with zoom if needed?
Edit: I swear I've just finished reading the whole thread and it looks like this guy is here, greetings!

Back then, those dot matrix printers had an adjustment in the works that moved the printing head closer to the paper. So I moved it as close as it would go. There's a metal platen, I can't believe I remember that term, on the other side of the paper that is a stop for the pressure of the pins. I covered that with electrical tape for a slight give, and make the paper even closer. The ribbon was in a cartridge and got shredded, but as long as the cartridge was in place, the printer still printed. You had to look at the print to tell if it needed to have the ribbon replaced back then.
On the software side, which was Word Perfect, I increased the font size to huge and bold. I'm not sure I needed to make it bold.
Had I tried some of that film for raised line drawings it might have been interesting, but I didn't have any at the time. I'm sure there was other types of paper that would have scarred more easily than regular printer paper.

It's a little too complicated to write out, but offset lithographic printing might be used in the second thing you brought up with the tactile paint. I'm trying to remember the process of getting the print and pictures onto the aluminum sheets, which used an ink that held oil and repelled water. I seem to remember that being slightly tactile, but I was a tiny, little kid when my family members worked at a newspaper. We used the aluminum sheets, with the mirrored print and pictures, as shingles on a back room of the house.
Ditto machines kind of worked in a similar way.
Anyway, all that rambling is to say, maybe some of the specialty inks could provide a path to having a thicker substance stick or not stick onto printed material in a multi step process. Maybe even some of those cloth printing inks.

I spent some time trying to figure this out, and even wasted some expensive paper sheets in the process, but I guess that this is one of those times where sighted assistance will be fundamental for me to understand what's happening.

I doubled the size of the viewport of my SVG, moved everything to the center, and then tried to print out from Safari, which resulted in a tiny portion of the rasterized image actually getting printed to paper. Then I did the same but instead of printing to paper I just opened Preview with the print job, and only part of the logo was visible, but VoiceOver did recognize part of the text in that logo, meaning that more content is visible in Preview than gets printed out, and this time printing from Preview yielded the same results as directly from Safari, with just a tiny portion of the rasterized image appearing at the center of the paper.

I also confirmed something that I had already noticed before, which is that the swell paper comes out of my laser printer with a slightly more bumpy texture, possibly due to being in contact with the drum inside the printer which is heated by the laser. While as I understand it the laser never shines directly on paper, it does shine on the drum to generate an electrostatic charge on it so that once the paper comes in, the ink in the toner gets pulled onto the paper, and I think that this heat is also causing small reactions on the swell paper that are changing its texture. New paper sheets are quite smooth to the touch, with the back side feeling like magazine paper and likely producing blurry specular reflection visual effects, while the front side is slightly less smooth but still smoother than regular paper, and when it comes out of my laser printer, the texture feels more like a rubbery and bumpy surface of an orange, but much denser and less pronounced, so people using this kind of hardware for production may want to opt for inkjet printers instead.

That paper you described sounds like photo paper, which one would use if they were printing up digital photos from something like a memory card. Not necessarily saying that that is what you're using, just that's what it sounds like from your description.

I'm loving this thread!

I do especially like the dot matrix idea.

I'm just thinking about the swell paper. How is the device actually inflating the paper? UV? It's obviously radiating heat which is reflected by the white paper and absorbed by the black. I'm just wondering if there is a cheaper means of activating it. £800 is expensive for a UV/IR lamp.

Maybe it's a misunderstanding on my end, but why the heck humanware and other keep calling these devices embossers? They are nothing but that, they are just heaters on steroid with a paper that loves being heated? :) They are not embossers yet hw put PIAF in the same category as actual braille embosser, a marketting laziness?
PS: after VOSH and another dev like thread about macos a11y infra problem, this is in my top teer list of best applevis threads, period. A friend of mine has a 3d printer, completely blind. And he's crazy happy with it.