Learning Through Touch: The Story of the BrailleDoodle with Dawn Campbell

Luisa Recchia: [00:00:00] Welcome to Through Our Eyes, a podcast created to share stories, resources, and conversations that bring hope, understanding, and connection to families navigating vision loss. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dawn Campbell, chief operating officer of the TouchPad Pro Foundation. Dawn shares the story behind the BrailleDoodle, a simple yet powerful tactical learning tool designed to help children and adults who are blind or low vision explore braille, creativity, STEM, and confidence through touch.

What I loved about this conversation is the reminder that accessibility does not always have to be complicated or out of reach. Sometimes the most meaningful tools are the ones that open a door to learning, independence, imagination, and possibility. Here’s my [00:01:00] conversation with Dawn Campbell.

Dawn Campbell: So my name is Dawn Campbell, and I’m chief operating officer at the Touchpad Pro Foundation.

Now, the Touchpad Pro Foundation is located in New York, just outside of New York City. Um, it was started by Daniel Lubiner, and we can talk a little bit more about Daniel’s story. But let me share where I’m calling in from right now. So I’m actually calling in just from outside of Toronto, Ontario.

I’ve been with the foundation for about a year and a half now, and I fell in love with the BrailleDoodle about a year and a half ago, uh, not long after I started working on the board of directors, I started volunteering. My background is in accessibility. My whole career has been in accessibility.

I started off as a teacher in special education. However, that was many years ago when there weren’t many teaching [00:02:00] jobs in Ontario, so I ended up diversifying and doing a whole lot of other things. Now, my story again, around accessibility is very personal because when I was 19 years old, I was in a head-on collision in my first year of college, and the man in the oncoming car passed away and I was trapped in my car for a very long time.

And my parents were told that I was going to u- lose my right leg. However, my leg was saved, and after about a year of rehab I kept all my parts. However, over the many years ago, that was over 30 years ago now, uh, I had my car accident. I have had a hip replacement. I have had an ankle replacement. So my work in accessibility, again, has always come from a very passionate place.

At a very young age, I was [00:03:00] exposed to the built environment barriers that exist within our society and was quite determined to change those. So over the years, a degree in education and a degree in disability studies I have gotten to work with not-for-profits, for-profits in the accessibility space for many years.

And it was at that time a year and a half ago, um, I was at a conference in Toronto- put on by the CNIB, which is the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and I was there representing a company that I was working with at the time in the document and digital accessibility space, when I happened to walk by this table and see this device laying on the table that [00:04:00] was about the size of a laptop, however, much less complicated than a laptop.

It had magnets and stainless steel balls, and I thought to myself, “Hmm, what is this? This seems too simple, too good to be true. What is this device lying here?” And that’s where I met Daniel Lubiner and I heard his story. Daniel Lubiner is the inventor of the BrailleDoodle, which is a device for tactile learning and learning braille and STEM, and I’ll describe a little bit more about that in a little bit.

But Daniel’s story started when he was also a teacher. He was teaching for many years, started teaching, got a role many years ago at a school for the blind just outside of New York, had this immediate love for literacy and for [00:05:00] children to excel when they were learning, you know, their alphabets and learning their literacy.

And he started working with students who were blind and low vision. And one of the things that really- Led to the creation of the BrailleDoodle was the impact that COVID had when all of his students were sent home. So at the time, Daniel was teaching literacy, but he was also teaching art to students.

Now, the students he was working with at this particular school, not only were they blind and low vision, but they also came from families that didn’t have a lot of means, so low-income families. And his students all went home with really nothing to do and a computer screen that they could not see. So Daniel happened to be on Amazon one day and found this very, very [00:06:00] cheap version of this toy that sort of had these balls and this magnet thing, and you take this pen, but all the balls would always fall down, and it wasn’t very reliable.

And he was thinking, “What if I could take an idea like this and really create something that would have impact for my students?” So because one of the things that he also discovered in talking to, again, all of his colleagues and through his work was that, especially during the pandemic, students who were blind and low vision, they weren’t learning braille, right?

There was no braille instruction happening. How do you teach braille over your computer when there… And again, students with no means to bring home embossers and paper and all of these, you know, and again, fancy displays, that’s one thing. But there was just none of that. So that led to the creation of the BrailleDoodle.

Luisa Recchia: Wow. Amazing. So I understand BrailleDoodle doesn’t require [00:07:00] electricity or internet. Tell us about that.

Dawn Campbell: Yes. Okay, so what is BrailleDoodle? BrailleDoodle is about the size of a laptop. It only weighs a couple of pounds, but it has all of these little holes, and within the holes contain little stainless steel balls, and you take a magnetic stylus and you drag the magnetic stylus across the board, and all the little balls pop up, and you can put pressure on the balls.

So you can touch them, you can feel them as many times as you want with light touch, and then when you want those balls to go away, you just simply press down and the balls fall back down. So it’s actually refreshable. It’s a refreshable display, but it doesn’t need batteries, doesn’t need a connection to the internet.

And what’s fascinating about the device is it’s two-sided. So on [00:08:00] one side of the device, it’s specifically for learning braille. And it’s also been set up at a, in a way, and this is where Daniel and I bonded over this, was this is an op- like, you could tell this was designed by a teacher. Because one thing we wanna do is we want to empower kids to learn and experience doing something on their own.

So when you look at the braille side of the BrailleDoodle, you’ll see that it’s set up in such a way where braille is a six-dot system, right? We know that. So there’s a component on the braille side where you learn dot one is A, and you actually, the other dots, the other stainless steel balls, they actually don’t come up.

You’re only learning that A is dot one. And once you learn that A is dot one, then you go [00:09:00] to the next braille cell on the device, and all six balls, actually all six dots, they do raise up. Because again, you want the child or you want the adult to experience having to figure out what is dot one. Mm-hmm. So you can make mistakes, and that was a really big part of s- the setup of this device, is if you don’t make mistakes, you don’t learn.

So you’re gonna learn dot one, and then you’re gonna practice it. You’re gonna learn B, and then you’re gonna practice it. Now, the other thing on the braille learning side is that there’s the raised letter, there’s the standard size braille, ’cause I should say, the stainless steel balls are actually five millimeter balls.

So it’s enlarged braille, right? It’s not super teeny-tiny, and that’s one thing that, again, has really appealed to adults who are lo- losing their vision too. And then there’s also another important piece of the braille side is being able to [00:10:00] practice putting your letters together to be able to make words.

A lot of tools that are out there right now you can learn the letters in isolation, but there’s nowhere in the same spot to be able to actually put those letters together to form words. And then at the bottom of the braille learning side, you actually have the standard size braille for the whole alphabet, as well as there’s that infamous typing sentence, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in English, where again, all the letters are represented.

So, you can only imagine the amount of games and learning and, you know, fun you can experience just on that braille learning side. And then you turn it over, and then when you turn it over, that’s a whole other side. That is your blank canvas side. So on the drawing side, [00:11:00] there’s like 1,333 of these little stainless steel balls- Wow

all positioned right beside each other. A lot of … There are some blind influencers out there right now that are calling it the Etch A Sketch for the blind. So it’s, it’s just … It’s not an Etch A Sketch, but it, if you’re kind of over 40, if you remember those- Yeah. … those days of the Etch A Sketch it’s kind of what it reminds you of because you can drag, you can draw, and you can just experience this freedom of expression by just drawing and being able to feel art.

Now, it started off with just this idea of being able to create images and pictures on one side, but then Daniel started thinking again, what if we make this educational but in a fun way? What if we put in an X, Y axis that you can’t see but you can feel with your fingers?” And then suddenly you have this kind of blank canvas in front [00:12:00] of you that has four quadrants, and now suddenly it’s like, what about advanced math concepts?

What about concepts that are really tricky to teach kids, like graphing and negative numbers, right? What if you can suddenly do that on this device? What if you can suddenly draw a map on the fly, right? Orientation and mobility specialists all of a sudden are getting ahold of this going, “Oh, well, you know, when we go out to a really busy intersection, you know what some of our street corners are like.

They’re very complicated to explain. What if I can very quickly draw a map on the fly that’s tactile that someone can feel and experience what it is I’m trying to describe to them?” So it just goes on and on and on.

Luisa Recchia: Oh, that’s amazing. I can only imagine what five years from now would look like for BrailleDoodle. Right? With his [00:13:00] imagination.

Dawn Campbell: Well, and like, and you know, the other piece too is it even came with three, like, we’ve designed three stencils to even slide onto the back. You remember with stencils, right? Yeah. Where you can kind of trace inside. You know, because what was interesting too was so many children who are born blind- really learn things in parts very different than the way children who have vision and lose their vision learn because, and what I mean by that is you’re gonna learn that a dog has, you’re gonna f- learn that there are legs, that there’s a body, that there’s a head, and then suddenly there’s this image of what a dog actually is.

And so with the, so think about learning how to draw. You give a kid with vision a pencil to draw a house, they’re probably gonna draw a triangle for the roof and a square for the body, right? And there’s like, there’s your house. But children who are born blind, [00:14:00] again, don’t have that whole image in their heads already.

So what’s been neat is to create a stencil that really just allows kids to draw and color in and color in whole parts, learn that a whole tree is a big tree versus a little tree. Talk about things like perception, things like, I remember Daniel telling me a story once of an older woman that he was at a conference speaking to, and he had slid this art stencil on, and the art stencil has a house and a couple of trees and a sidewalk across the fr- across the bottom.

And he started talking to her about these two different trees on here, and was talking about perception and this idea that is this tree bigger or smaller? But it really depends on where you are standing in relation to that tree, whether it looks to a visual person. And this woman was like, “No one has ever taught me that before in my life.”

And it was just- … you know, it was just, just [00:15:00] so incredible to kind of hear these stories. And then math and, you know, again, being able to just have a stencil that creates more braille cells so you can practice putting together not just words, but putting together actual paragraphs and, and writing like that.

Luisa Recchia: Let’s talk about a parent who just learned that their child may experience significant, uh, vision loss.

When would you suggest, or when should braille or tactile learning enter that conversation?

Dawn Campbell: So I mean, let’s preface that with, I’m not a vision specialist, right? I’m not a, I’m not- Mm-hmm … an expert in vision. But through the years I’ve had working with parents, through the years that I’ve had hearing stories of adults who have lost their, who again, over time have lost their vision or started with a little bit I think, again, it’s just knowing that- Learning [00:16:00] braille and experiencing that tactile freedom is so important as early as possible.

And I think what people find astounding is the fact that our literacy rates around learning braille in Canada, in the United States, in so many countries is really, really low. I don’t like using wor- like stats like less than 10% because nobody really knows, but that’s sort of the number you’ll hear through National Federation of the Blind, Braille Literacy Canada.

You’ll hear these stats that less than 10% of children are learning braille, and I’m sure it’s staggeringly even lower for adults who are lo- losing their vision. And in some countries where BrailleDoodle is, we’re in 17 different countries right [00:17:00] now, and Daniel, for example, has always had a passion for Ind- for traveling to India.

And in India, there are just millions of children, less than 1% of children who are blind/low vision learning braille in places like India. And we could probably spend all day debating and, you know, again, talking about all of those reasons, but I think that, again, learning braille should enter as early as possible.

It’s interesting how some of our blind organizations, I, like I- obviously things change and advance over time, right, and, and learning processes change, but I was at a conference just recently, and it reminds me of this situation, this scenario. I was talking with this woman. She was well into her 50s, and she was completely blind, but she started out very [00:18:00] young losing her vision very young, and because she had a little bit of

Because she still had, pieces of her vision, she wasn’t encouraged at, at all to learn braille And now, as she’s, you know, into her 50s and she’s lost all of her sight, she, you know, when I showed her the BrailleDoodle, like she just got so excited because she’s like, “I’ve always wanted to learn.

I’ve been afraid to learn. You know, they told me I didn’t need to learn it because I should just use what sight I had, but here I am, like everybody, aging over time. And, you know, and now I don’t have this skill.” You know, I guess that was a really long-winded way of just saying that I just don’t ever think it should be, it should be ruled out.

And I would love to find a way to, with the idea of BrailleDoodle, and we are a [00:19:00] not-for-profit, and I didn’t say that at the beginning, but I feel like it’s something we should talk about. We’re a not-for-profit trying to get these devices out to the world- … and into the hands of people who need them.

And our goal with that is that by keeping the price point, it’s 179 US dollars here in the United States, the reason we’re fighting so hard to keep that margin affordable for people is because we don’t just want one BrailleDoodle in a classroom, right? We want 10 of them in a classroom. And I can tell you that if you have one child who’s, you know, low vision or blind in a classroom, you put one BrailleDoodle in there, there’s gonna be a fight.

There’s gonna be … a battle constantly, right? Around who’s gonna get access to this. So we don’t want one. We want many. And [00:20:00] that way children with disabilities and without disabilities have that opportunity. And that children who, again, are fully sighted who over the course of their lifetime might experience accident or injury resulting in vision loss or blind, right?

It’s- … the idea of it isn’t, isn’t so scary.

Luisa Recchia: Well, what about the misconceptions that people have about Braille, in a world filled with audiobooks, screen readers, digital books? Talk about that.

Dawn Campbell: So audio access is incredible, but it’s not the same as literacy, right? And I’m very blessed that I have a son who’s not experienced any disability.

He’s now in grade eight, but I can tell you, had he started kindergarten and someone … And his teacher told [00:21:00] me, “Don’t worry, he doesn’t have to learn how to print. He’ll just, he’ll just use AI and it’ll type all his emails for him,” I probably would’ve had a big problem with that, right? Right.

Like, no parent, right? And so that’s just where the tools that we’ve come up with, the audio everything, has been amazing advancements, but it doesn’t replace basic literacy and being able to create words, and being able to understand grammar, and being able to ex- you know, and being able to express yourself.

So that’s just where you’re right, there are misconceptions that we’ve got these tools that can just do it for us. Mm-hmm. And when you … You know, I don’t know the statistics, you know, I don’t wanna … It’s hard to quote statistics when, you know, I’m not, I’m not staring at a, a scholarly article to help me out here.[00:22:00]

But, the research that I’ve done, the research that we’ve had that people share with us all the time, is that there are some really interesting statistics around adults who know braille being way more employed, right- … than adults who don’t know braille. Uh-huh. You know, like, when you get into so- like, looking at some of those things, you start to go, yeah, no. Exposing children to braille at a very young age is, is gonna be, hugely important. Don’t rule it out.” And being able to just label things, being able to, like, just the whole tactile literacy experience, right? Kids being able to do things for themselves, and that’s why the, on the BrailleDoodle side, where kids can learn about graphing and learn about- Mm[00:23:00]

you know, experience, like, tactile liter- like tactile math and STEM activities is, like, so … Like, it’s just such a beautiful thing to watch when you see kids, figuring things, figuring these things out for themselves.

Luisa Recchia: Speak more into that. I’m hearing confidence building.

Dawn Campbell: Realizing, I guess you’re right, like there is this emotional moment when touch can become expression, and there is a difference between consuming information and creating something independently.

And that’s where we’ve had some beautiful experiences with the people that have been purchasing BrailleDoodles in that way. And the device started as something that would be helpful f- [00:24:00] like again, it was Daniel’s experience with children and teenagers that led to the creation of the BrailleDoodle, but what we didn’t expect was that half of our sales would be to adults.

Okay. And just like children, there is confidence and there is excitement and there is just pure joy in being able to create that you see when people pick up a BrailleDoodle.

Luisa Recchia: Let me ask a question around education. What should parents ask teachers or schools or vision specialists when they’re advocating for tactile learning tools?

Dawn Campbell: I guess a big part of it is knowing what’s out there, right? And that, I think, is the biggest challenge.

Like, that is where y- around the United States, we [00:25:00] have these amazing assistive technology libraries, right? We do have assistive technology distributors in every state that really know what’s on the market, and I think that’s the o- like, parents have to do their own due diligence and not just rely on school boards to, again, know what’s gonna help their child.

So I think that’s where knowing parents who really take an active role in n- finding conferences like the CSUN Technology Conference, like ATIA. I’m heading to a conference in a couple of weeks called Envision, the Alliance Serve Conference in Columbus, Ohio, right? Like, there are these [00:26:00] amazing opportunities to just sur- immerse yourself in the technology that’s out there and available.

It’s okay for parents to have fear, and it’s okay for, and, and that’s, like that’s all totally understandable. But if you can surround yourself with other, you know, again, with other parents and with other families that have gone through similar things.

Like there are just … You know, look for the advocates that are out there because so many people with vision loss and who are blind can do such amazing things in life and be such amazing contributors to making our society better. You just have to l- you just have to look. Like you just have to look for those advocates.

And, you know, I’ve always had [00:27:00] such an appreciation for people like Molly Burke, people like Anthony Ferraro, people like the Blind Brothers who work endlessly to help parents see the potential within their kids.

Luisa Recchia: Yeah, because they do all have potential, don’t they?

Dawn Campbell: We all do, right? It’s- Yeah … just having the right ex- like, again, the right exposure to, And that’s why, you know, that’s, that was one of the reasons why just when I saw BrailleDoodle, I thought, “You know, there’s something to this low-tech device.”

There’s something to this where, you know, we are in this age where we’re bombarded by so much advanced technology and big price tags that come with some of that advanced technology, [00:28:00] that when it comes right down to it and there’s a natural disaster or something like COVID and we all go home sometimes it’s, it’s those products that have simplicity to them that really become so important for means of communication.

Luisa Recchia: So tell our audience that is listening, where do they start?

How do they find BrailleDoodle?

Dawn Campbell: Yeah. Absolutely. So our website is www.brailledoodle.org. Mm-hmm. Nice and simple.

Now, we are a small not-for-profit, so we are working with distributors in various countries. We’re always looking to bring on other assistive technology distributors to, again, help us get these into the hands of as many children and adults who need them. So in the United States, we have some amazing partners like [00:29:00] LS&S, AT Guys, some other distributors that, again, we’re just starting to, starting to get on board, that you can just go to their website and order them.

We’re going into our third manufacturing run. We’re hoping to have BrailleDoodles, our next run of BrailleDoodles out this summer. If a parent is in a situation where they don’t feel they can afford a BrailleDoodle, again, just reach out to us on our website. We have started that list of those that we will be able to donate to in the future.

That is, that is our goal. And our mission is to not have anyone ever be turned away because of the price point. So brailledoodle.org or just, you know, we’ve got some tremendous, uh, YouTube videos out there. We’ve got some great advocates on our behalf, so [00:30:00] we’re pretty easy to find on Google.

Thank you for letting us, letting me share BrailleDoodle with the world letting parents know that tactile literacy and having those creativity moments at such a young age just builds so much confidence. And we just really hope that, um, BrailleDoodle can reach as many children and adults as possible.

Luisa Recchia: Thank you for listening to this episode of Through Our Eyes. A special thank you to Dawn Campbell for joining us and for sharing the mission behind the BrailleDoodle. This conversation was such a beautiful reminder that learning, creativity, and access to the right tools can help build confidence at a very young age, and that every child deserves the opportunity to explore, learn, and dream.

To learn more about the [00:31:00] BrailleDoodle, visit brailledoodle.org. If this episode encouraged you, please share it with another parent, educator, therapist, or advocate who may benefit from learning about this resource. Together, we can continue helping families see the potential, the possibilities, and the hope in every child.

Until next time, thank you for joining us on Through Our Eyes.