Tactile relief models can convey landscape scale, form, and geology to blind visitors

Evidence

“I took his hands and moved them around the crater model in relief, trying to convey through his sensitive fingertips and through his quick, eager mental perception the general shape of the crater and the variations of its rim skyline. By putting his thumb tips together, with hands extended, the little fingers accomplished the scaled diameter of the lake. … Then we moved the fingertips up the modeled face of Llao Rock, the two inches on the model representing the sheer face of almost twenty-two hundred feet of drop. He understood that there were two thousand more feet of the crater below the surface of the water. His fingers told him the conical shape of Wizard Island. The tiny depression at the summit of the cone gave him not only that special feature, but the type of many other craters too. He could see, through his fingers, the lava flows that extend from the base of the island cone. And then we traced out the U-shaped glacial valleys and compared them with the V-shaped stream-cut valleys in other parts of the park. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 699

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the polyad’s listening/observation-as-method thread and the tactile, smell, taste engagement point already made in ch18 of this same book. — connects to: Guided trails extend interpretation to smell, taste, touch, and hearing — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 712; Children grasp relational wholes when a concept centers on their own home place — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 339