Rico Chan: Touching Vision

Dr. Rico Chan and his team from social enterprise Beyond Vision International (BVI) open the world of arts and culture to the blind through an invention that combines tactile illustrations and audio descriptions, advocating the needs of the neglected and teaching the visually impaired that they, too, can voice their demands.

When Dr. Rico Chan was tasked by the Ebenezer School & Home for the Visually Impaired to design a tactile textbook about the city's public transportation for its grade-three students in 2018, its teachers wanted to switch out his detailed drawings for more rudimentary shapes and lines, claiming his version was "too difficult for nine-year-olds to understand", recalls Rico, the Involve Category winner of the 2025 JESSICA Most Successful Women Awards.

He refused and instead pleaded to test his system for a week. Sure enough, when it came time for these students to draw their interpretations of the subject, they adorned buses with windows – rather than just scribbling a square with four wheels – and Star Ferries flourished from a sailboat composed of a half circle topped with a flag to a vessel with swim rings, metal rails and even squiggly waves of water around them.

Prior to the help of BVI, of which he is founder, the students at the Pok Fu Lam school mainly relied on braille texts. Rico's tactile illustrations brought a 180-degree transformation in class dynamics – a change so remarkable that the school has since dedicated a permanent gallery space for tactile art. Two years ago, his system was translated and launched in Korea.

"Students are more enthusiastic and want to engage with the subject: seeing the change in the kids really brought me to tears," says Rico.

This Tactile-Visual Vocabulary System (TVVS) is a subbranch of his proud Tactile Audio Interaction System (TAIS), a 2016 invention that turns sights ranging from landmarks like The Big Buddha in Lantau to paintings and even large-scale installations into tactile boards helmed with an outline of the depicted visual. The silhouette of the work is surrounded by blotches of patterns that represent colors. Green is indicated by straight lines, while yellows by triangles and blue by waves; and bigger color symbols mean darker hues. Users who are born without sight, adds Rico, can associate warm colors to heat and anger or calmness and chill to cooler tones.

For large-scale installations, such as the TAIS he designed for the teamLab: Continuous exhibition at Tamar Park last year, he made a paper pop-up booklet showcasing the glowing eggs and the surrounding trees "so visually impaired visitors can get a sense of how the artwork interacts with life around it, beyond just what the eggs feel like up close," he says.

TAIS is also complemented with audio descriptions, which Rico tries to contain within three minutes so to promise engagement without boring his visitors. For clarity, audio descriptions are verbal depictions of what's in front of them only; these differ from audio guides, which offer additional information, such as history of the artist or of the artwork.

"When information is available only as sound or touch, it's very ambiguous to the visually impaired. Combining them, however, confirms what they're hearing and what they're touching – it's a big step up in terms of their experience," says Rico. Currently, establishments like Hong Kong Museum of Art, Tai Kwun, Singapore National Gallery and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco have TAIS for a portion of their works, often of more high-profile artists and exhibitions that can justify an additional budget for these non-mainstream audiences.

Cost, he says, is the biggest hurdle to growing his footprint. While Rico's team has got the design of TAIS down to an efficient science, each piece of work still requires a script writer and a voice actor, though he's exploring AI implementation in the future to lower the bill. Museums and galleries – especially those that are sheathed in red tape – then fall into a chicken-or-egg-first trap: without valid data to support the dire demand for tactile and audio aids, they cannot make a case for such costly additions, especially for temporary exhibitions. But if they don't take the first step towards accessibility and inclusivity, the visually impaired will never step foot in these institutions.

Since founding TAIS close to a decade ago, Rico says he's seen more wide-spread audio descriptions and tactile information, or a helpful, sighted guide available at museums. The referrals from the institutions he's worked with have nurtured a newfound trust amongst new museums BVI is approaching. Even more impressively, he's seen an increased number of visually impaired visitors voicing their need for aids, when before, they'd likely refrain from partaking the event at all or expect to be turned away.

Truthfully, he says, running BVI is not an easy job, as his collaborators, employees and volunteers may struggle to understand his intentions and the goals he's trying to achieve. His solution?

"Sharing my inspiration and passion and getting my hands dirty to show people that this is what we can do," he says. "Design can change how we perceive diversity, inclusivity and how we accept other people's suggestions and differences.