Touch!

This article investigates how blind and low vision (BLV) children engage with and represent museum collections through tactile exploration, drawing, and making. Museums have historically privileged visual modes of display, limiting how BLV communities can access, interpret, and contribute to cultural knowledge. This project repositions touch, multisensory interpretation, and co-creation as central to more inclusive forms of museum representation. We developed workflows for producing 3D-printed tactile models of natural history specimens and evaluated them in workshops with BLV children aged 6–14. Guided by the Weight, Ends/Edges, Size, Shape, Sound, Texture, Temperature (WESSST) framework, participants undertook structured tactile encounters that extended into raised-line drawing and clay modelling. These iterative cycles of touching, mapping, inscribing, and re-making revealed distinctive sensory strategies—ranging from sequential tactile surveying to cross-modal translation—highlighting BLV children as active interpreters, storytellers, and cultural co-producers. The study contributes: (1) tactile artefacts and reproducible workflows for representing collection objects in multisensory form; (2) empirical insights into how BLV children make sense of, transform, and re-express museum specimens; (3) methodological advances in participatory, multisensory co-creation with BLV young people; (4) a reframing of drawing and modelling as embodied representational practices; and (5) a practical toolkit for museums seeking to embed BLV-led approaches into interpretation and display. By positioning BLV accessibility as a catalyst for new representational practices, this work expands the possibilities for inclusive museology and multisensory ways of knowing.