Inventivio / Tactonom

Blind and visually impaired students place printed tactile graphics on the Tactonom Reader and touch the raised surface to hear real-time audio descriptions, accessing diagrams, maps, and math content that educational publishers produce only in visual formats.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Use Assistive Technologies

What it is

Inventivio GmbH is a Nuremberg, Germany-based company, registered in February 2004 and led by founder and CEO Klaus-Peter Hars, that builds the Tactonom line of audio-tactile reading devices for blind and visually impaired people.¹ The company's primary product is the Tactonom Reader family: desktop and portable devices that sit on a flat surface, hold a printed tactile graphic on a magnetic metal plate, and use an integrated RGB camera to track the user's fingertip position across the raised surface. When a user's finger lands on a defined region of the graphic, the device plays a spoken audio description of that element in real time.²³

The workflow for a student or teacher involves three steps. First, an SVG file is downloaded from the ProBlind Share database, a library of over 1,900 audio-tactile learning graphics maintained by ProBlind e.V., a German nonprofit that holds legal authorization to produce accessible-format versions of copyrighted educational materials under German copyright law.⁴ Second, the SVG is printed at full scale on swell paper using a laser printer and passed through a heat machine (the Tactonom Transformer or a compatible device), which causes the black-ink lines to expand into raised ridges. Third, the finished tactile graphic is placed on the Reader's surface and the user explores it by touch while the device delivers audio descriptions.⁵⁶

The Tactonom Reader Flex is a lighter, portable version that folds for transport and supports A3 and A4 graphic formats. It is priced at €4,500 (plus VAT) in Germany, £4,495 in the UK, and $5,495 in the United States through the US master distributor Ability2Access.⁷⁸ The Magic Math Set adds a tactile ruler, protractor, and compass that communicate with the Reader and read measurements aloud, enabling independent geometry work.⁹

Inventivio also produces the Tactonom Pro, a fully dynamic refreshable pin display with more than 10,000 electromagnetic pins that rise and fall under software control to display Braille text, graphs, tables, maps, and charts in real time. The Pro received €3.12 million in EU Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator funding and was reported to be in use by selected customers as of late 2023; it has not been released for general sale.¹⁰¹¹

In Germany, the Tactonom Reader Flex carries official Hilfsmittelnummern in the GKV Hilfsmittelverzeichnis (the statutory health insurance directory of medical aids), meaning blind students of compulsory school age can apply to have the device covered through their health insurance with a prescription from an ophthalmologist. No equivalent reimbursement pathway exists in the United States.¹²

Why it matters

Educational publishing organized itself around visual graphics before blind students had any systematic claim on those materials. Mainstream textbooks, workbooks, atlases, and science materials have been produced with diagrams, charts, and illustrations as core content for the sighted majority since mass-print education became standard in the nineteenth century. The American Printing House for the Blind, founded in 1858, received a Congressional mandate in 1879 to produce accessible educational materials for blind students below college level -- a mandate that acknowledged the structural exclusion built into mass-print education rather than fixing it.¹³ Thermoforming, the dominant method for producing durable tactile graphic duplicates, has been used since the 1960s but requires a physical master, a specialist producer, and distribution logistics that made on-demand classroom graphics essentially impossible.¹⁴ Swell paper, developed in the late twentieth century, brought on-site graphic production to the classroom but still requires teacher time, design skill, and equipment. The inherited default is a publishing and educational infrastructure that spent more than a century treating visual graphics as the baseline and blind students' access as an add-on problem to be solved downstream.

Only about 4% of all learning graphics are accessible to blind students, according to ProBlind e.V.⁴ Inventivio and its distributors describe the gap as approximately 25,000 graphics that sighted students encounter through their schooling against fewer than 100 available to blind students, a figure originating from Inventivio's own materials rather than independent research, but one whose directional accuracy is confirmed by independent evidence.⁷⁸ A national Australian survey of 71 vision-impaired higher education students found that 84% reported skipping graphical material often or sometimes, 50% had avoided a potential study area or career due to concerns about graphics access, and only 11% of vision-impaired students enrolled in STEM fields compared to 24% of the general student population.¹⁵ A 2024 literature review in Springer Nature's educational accessibility series identified teachers using inaccessible materials and nonexistent tactile graphics as documented barriers contributing to a 44% unemployment rate among people with visual impairments overall.¹⁶

Educational publishers print visual graphics for a market that is overwhelmingly sighted, and the incremental cost of producing accessible-format alternatives for a small minority is not recovered through sales. Publishers treat accessible-format production as someone else's problem: either the school, the teacher, a specialist organization like APH, or the student. This is the same pattern the ENABLE Model identifies across content production more broadly -- the builder optimizes for the majority and leaves the remainder to downstream compensation. The EU's decision to provide €3.17 million across two grants to support Tactonom Pro development is a documented instance of government funding filling a market gap that commercial incentives will not close on their own.¹⁰¹¹ Klaus-Peter Hars has tied the educational graphics gap directly to the economic outcome: "If blind people can access this information then there is no reason to have an unemployment rate of 75%."¹⁷

German statutory health insurance covers the Tactonom Reader Flex for school-age blind children who obtain a prescription from an ophthalmologist, a reimbursement pathway that does not exist in the United States.¹²⁸ When Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind purchased two Tactonom Readers in 2023, it paid approximately $5,500 per device out of the school's own budget, a price that schools serving one or two blind students cannot routinely absorb.¹⁸ Adults who need graphic access for work, including spreadsheets, floor plans, and data visualizations, fall outside the school-age reimbursement scope even in Germany and pay the full device cost themselves. The European Blind Union reports an unemployment rate of over 75% among working-age blind and partially sighted people in Europe, a figure that reflects the compounding effect of educational exclusion.¹⁹

Forty-four percent of blind students in the Australian survey had definitely avoided a study area or career because of graphics access concerns, a foreclosure of intellectual and economic possibility that the research literature connects to depression, diminished self-efficacy, and social isolation in disabled populations.¹⁵ The pathway from educational exclusion to economic exclusion to poverty and its health consequences runs through the same structural default that was built into mass-print education in the nineteenth century and has not been restructured since. When a blind student spends an academic career learning without graphical content that structures mathematical reasoning, scientific understanding, and geographic literacy, the harm extends beyond the missed content: the student accumulates years of evidence that the mainstream world of knowledge was not built for them, with documented psychological costs in the literature on disability, stigma, and chronic exclusion.¹⁶

The Tactonom Reader addresses the compensation layer without changing the structural condition that creates it. A blind student using the device can touch a tactile diagram and hear what each element represents. That is a real capability that was not available before. But the device requires a graphic to exist in the ProBlind database, requires a school or family to own a Reader ($4,500–$5,500) and a heat machine, requires a laser printer, and requires a teacher or specialist to manage the workflow. The 4% of learning graphics that have been made accessible are accessible in part because of Inventivio and ProBlind's work; the other 96% remain inaccessible whether a student owns a Reader or not. The Tactonom Pro's dynamic pin display, if it reaches general commercial availability at the affordable price point Inventivio has targeted, would represent a more fundamental shift: any digital graphic could in principle be rendered tactilely in real time, rather than requiring a pre-existing SVG in a database. That would change the structural relationship between blind students and graphical content more substantively. As of 2024, the Pro remains with selected customers only.¹⁰

Real-world examples

In the news

Utah student becomes first in United States to use special reader device for the blind (September 2023)
-- Fox 13, Salt Lake City

• Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind purchased two Tactonom Readers at $5,500 each after a USDB technology professional discovered Inventivio at a technology convention in California. Cami Cordero, a 19-year-old blind student in the USDB Bridges Program in Ogden, Utah, became the first blind student in the United States to use the device. The report documents the pattern the ENABLE Model identifies at the content stage: a mainstream educational system produces inaccessible materials, and disabled students and their institutions carry the cost and labor of obtaining compensating tools.

In the news

Tactile Excel sheets and graphics boost job prospects for blind people (2022)
-- Horizon Magazine, European Commission

• EU-funded coverage of Inventivio's Horizon 2020 project, including Klaus-Peter Hars's framing: "If blind people can access this information then there is no reason to have an unemployment rate of 75%." The article frames graphical inaccessibility as an employment pipeline problem: blind workers excluded from data-rich environments (spreadsheets, maps, technical documents) are excluded from the modern knowledge economy. The EU grant represents government recognition that commercial publishers will not close this gap on their own.

In the news

Tactonom enables visually impaired to access digital content (2022)
-- The Mayor EU

• Coverage of the EU funding award and the Tactonom Pro development. The Mayor EU's report describes the 75% unemployment rate as the driver for Inventivio's stated ten-year goal of helping 10% of blind people under 65 in Europe integrate into the workforce. It documents the company's framing of the problem as structural rather than individual.

• In September 2023, Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind technology professional discovered Inventivio at a technology convention and contacted the company, which had not previously sold to a US audience. The school paid approximately $5,500 per device. Blind student Cami Cordero used the device to explore maps, geometry diagrams, and other graphic content she could not access through her school's standard materials.¹⁸

• A €12,000 donation from the Rotary Club Offenbach-Dreieich in March 2023 funded a pilot project deploying Tactonom Readers at the Hermann Herzog School, a school for the blind in Germany. The donation route, a charitable grant to fund a device addressing an educational gap, illustrates the distance between what the German school system provides by default and what blind students need.²⁰

• Philipps-Universität Marburg, the German university with the largest proportional representation of blind and low-vision students (approximately 150), uses the Tactonom Reader as part of its support infrastructure. Marburg students appeared in a ZDF "Volle Kanne" public television feature in July 2023 demonstrating the device.²¹²²

• The Blind Abilities podcast recorded Klaus-Peter Hars demonstrating the Tactonom Reader at the 2023 National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Convention in Houston, Texas, the first documented US public demonstration of the device to the organized blind community.²³

• A 2024 academic study (SONOICE, published in Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences) tested navigation interface improvements for the Tactonom Reader with 10 participants. Using the standard touch-only method, successful navigation within 60 seconds occurred only 10% of the time. A new audio-navigation interface reduced mean completion time from 57.85 seconds to 15.48 seconds. The study documents both the device's utility and the friction of its default navigation model.²⁴

• The 2023 Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness study "Bridging the Gap of Graphical Information Accessibility in Education" found that blind and low-vision students rated interactive touchscreen devices significantly more helpful, interesting, and easier to understand than large-print or traditional static tactile graphics across all measured dimensions.²⁵

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the content stage involves producing accessible graphical materials as part of the standard publication workflow rather than as an afterthought:

• "Every diagram in this textbook ships with an SVG in the ProBlind database and a print-ready swell paper file."
• "We test all math graphics with blind students and teachers of the visually impaired before the unit goes to print."
• "Our curriculum standards require accessible graphic formats alongside every visual illustration."
• "We partner with APH and ProBlind to produce tactile versions concurrently with the visual originals."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at the content stage involves publishing visual graphics without accessible alternatives and treating accessibility as someone else's budget and labor problem:

• "Blind students can ask their TVI to describe the graphs."
• "The market for tactile versions is too small to justify the production cost."
• "Accessible formats are available on request." *1
• "The district can apply for equipment grants if they need something special."
• "Our curriculum standards don't require tactile graphics."

*1: "Available on request" transfers the production burden, the delay, and often the cost to the school or family. It is not the same as accessible by default.

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor blind students carry when educational graphics are published without accessible alternatives:

• "I use the Tactonom Reader to explore diagrams my sighted classmates just glance at. It takes me ten times longer, but at least I can do it independently."²
• "Before I had this device, I had to ask someone to describe every chart in my textbook. Sometimes that person was wrong."
• "I download graphics from ProBlind because my school doesn't provide tactile versions of anything."
• "My school has the Reader but only one device for all the blind students. When it's checked out, I wait."
• "I looked at the engineering program and saw how much of the curriculum was diagram-based. I picked a different major."¹⁵
• "The graphic isn't in the ProBlind database. I emailed them. They said I can upload one if I make it in Inkscape."

---

All observations occur within the context of graphical content access in mainstream education systems in Germany and the United States, where educational publishers produce tactile-inaccessible visual materials as the default and blind students, schools, and assistive technology providers carry the compensating labor.

Footnotes

1. Inventivio GmbH corporate registry — NorthData ↩

2. Tactonom Reader Flex — Tactonom product page ↩ ↩²

3. SONOICE! study technical description — Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences, August 2024 ↩

4. About ProBlind e.V. ↩ ↩²

5. Swell Touch paper and machine — Zychem Limited ↩

6. FAQ — Tactonom ↩

7. Tactonom Reader Flex — VisionAid UK ↩ ↩²

8. Tactonom Reader — Ability2Access USA ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Magic Math Set — Tactonom product page ↩

10. Tactonom EIC Accelerator — EU CORDIS project 968187 ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. TACTONOM project — BayFOR Bavaria European Liaison Office ↩ ↩²

12. Application as an Aid — Tactonom ↩ ↩²

13. American Printing House for the Blind — Wikipedia ↩

14. APH: How Tactile Graphics Are Made ↩

15. Principles for improving vision impaired students' access to graphics — Accessible Graphics ↩ ↩² ↩³

16. Educational Accessibility in STEM for Visually Impaired and Blind Students — Springer Nature, 2024 ↩ ↩²

17. Tactile Excel sheets and graphics boost job prospects for blind people — Horizon Magazine ↩

18. Utah student becomes first in US to use Tactonom Reader — Fox 13 Salt Lake City, September 2023 ↩ ↩²

19. Facts and Figures — European Blind Union ↩

20. Press coverage — Tactonom ↩

21. Information for students who are blind or low-vision — Philipps-Universität Marburg ↩

22. Press coverage — Tactonom ↩

23. The World at Your Fingertips with Tactonom Reader — Blind Abilities podcast, August 2023 ↩

24. SONOICE! a Sonar-Voice dynamic user interface — Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences, August 2024 ↩

25. Bridging the Gap of Graphical Information Accessibility in Education — Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 2023 ↩