TAMP-OS: An Open-Source Workflow for Tactile 3D-Printable Lithographs

Describe an animal without using the verb look. The world is filled with features too small for our eyes to see: the setae on a gecko's feet, the cuticles covering a rat's whisker, or the fuzziness of a bat's wing. Can you effectively provide an alternative method for interpreting complex microscopy images while preserving the length scale? In this work, we provide a fully open-source lithograph workflow, allowing rapid creation of three-dimensional (3D) printable lithograph files for tactile accessibility for generalized images. The lithographs made in this workflow utilize a customizable API, allowing users to manually input various output variables (resolution, relief height, and blur) while outputting various file types (STL, STP, 3MF, and GLB). This workflow is validated on several different commercial 3D printers. This work seeks to leverage 3D printing to create tactile graphics and art, making science more accessible and enabling novel tactile exploration of biological structures. This workflow is paired with an open-source GitHub repository for Tactile Accessible Microscopy Printing (TAMP-OS; https://github.com/nagova/TAMP-OS). The TAMP-OS workflow includes a step-by-step guide, allowing other users to branch and augment the code for their customizable use cases while maintaining an open-source codebase allowing users to adapt all parts of the workflow for their needs.