Description:

A Day at the Farm is a tactile, interactive picturebook designed to bring blind and sighted readers—children and caregivers—together in shared storytelling. It responds to a fundamental gap in early childhood publishing: while many picturebooks rely solely on visual content, very few are built to be experienced by readers with vision impairments. Fewer still are designed for families where one reader is blind and the other is sighted. This book was created to support those families—to offer a reading experience that is inclusive, sensory-rich, and emotionally resonant for everyone involved.

The project was developed with young children in mind, particularly those living with blindness or low vision from an early age. These conditions can affect not just sight, but also motor development, emotional wellbeing, and language acquisition. A Day at the Farm offers a space where those developmental needs are supported holistically—through touch, sound, storytelling, and connection.

The book is physically interactive. Raised line illustrations, soft textured surfaces, and low-glare printing help support tactile reading. The colours are high-contrast but gentle, and the forms are bold and simplified for ease of recognition. English and Braille are placed side-by-side on each page, with a layout that respects both visual and tactile reading hierarchies—so that neither mode dominates. Whether it’s a blind adult reading to a sighted child, or a sighted adult reading to a blind child, both can engage meaningfully in the experience. This balanced, dual-access approach is the book’s central innovation.

The story is simple and grounded in everyday experiences: a child’s visit to a farm. This setting offers opportunities for rich tactile representation—fur, feathers, water, wool—and a narrative arc that supports curiosity, repetition, and learning. Characters and environments are introduced through raised illustrations that are designed to be understood by touch, not just sight.

What makes this project stand out is the emphasis on shared reading. So many children’s books are either highly visual or adapted as an afterthought for blind readers. This one was designed from the start to be co-experienced. The goal was not just access, but participation—for whānau to sit together and explore a story as equals, regardless of who can see the page.

Although still a prototype, A Day at the Farm has already attracted strong interest from educators, librarians, and accessibility advocates. It has sparked conversations about the future of inclusive design in publishing, and how we might better serve all readers—especially our youngest.

At its heart, this project is about equity, empathy, and design as a bridge. It asks: what would picturebooks look like if we designed not just for how we read, but how we connect? A Day at the Farm begins to answer that question—one textured page at a time.