South Korean school makes yearbooks blind students can touch, feel

Most people remember yearbooks as a visual time capsule. Awkward haircuts, inside jokes in the margins, group photos that prove you belonged to a moment in time.

But if you’re blind or visually impaired, yearbooks are often just another reminder that school culture is built around sight, photos, posters, slideshows, and visual noticeboards as the default language of memory.

At Daegu Kwangmyung School, a specialized school in South Korea for students with visual impairment, teachers and researchers asked a different question. What if memory didn’t have to be visual at all? Their answer was a 3D-printed yearbook, a graduation album where classmates’ faces appear as raised, tactile relief portraits, designed to be recognized through touch.

It’s a small object with a big message: access is the starting point.

Yearbooks were never designed for blind students

In many school systems, accessibility is still treated like an afterthought, something that gets “accommodated” later, if at all.

Blind and visually impaired students are frequently expected to adapt to classrooms that weren’t designed with them in mind: inaccessible learning materials, limited access to diagrams and visual references, and school culture that assumes everyone experiences the world the same way. Yearbooks are a perfect example of that bias. They’re built to be seen, not held.

So even when blind students are present in the classroom, the “memory object” that marks the end of school often excludes them from the experience of remembering their peers in the way yearbooks promise everyone else.

Inside Daegu Kwangmyung School’s 3D yearbook

According to reporting by The Korea Times, graduates from the class of 2021 at Daegu Kwangmyung School received a yearbook containing 3D-printed faces they could explore through touch, along with names embossed in Braille.

And the yearbook also included a feature where short recordings of graduation speeches can be played by pressing a button.

The portraits were created through a process that included 3D scanning and 3D printing, translating facial features like jawlines, cheekbones, contours into something readable through fingertips.

The people behind it: teachers, researchers, and a longer timeline than you’d think

The Korea Times reports that the collaboration began in 2019, when the school partnered with Creative Factory, described as a startup incubation center at Kyungpook National University, to create a yearbook specifically for visually impaired students.

A teacher at the school, Jeong Moon-jun described yearbooks as special objects that hold memories, and said he wanted his students to have yearbooks made for them.

A researcher, Hwang Ung-bi, shared that the project aimed to “remove the bars to new technology,” noting that people with visual impairment can be marginalized as technology evolves and that design should account for the strength of reading by touch.

The production was also labor-intensive. The Korea Times reports that teachers and a team of 11 researchers worked for six months to design and produce the yearbook.

And importantly, this doesn’t appear to be a one-off. Jeong said the school planned to create an upgraded version for the next graduating class.

There are also signs the idea predates the class of 2021. Editorial photo captions from a January 7, 2020 commencement in Daegu describe graduates touching faces in a “3D-printed yearbook.” That suggests the school’s tactile yearbook work has existed in iterations over multiple years.

A lot of “inclusive design” still operates like this: build the mainstream version first, then retrofit it for disabled users later, if budget, time, or goodwill allows.

This is closer to universal design thinking. Designing products and environments to be usable by the widest range of people, from the start, without requiring special adaptation.

The larger issue is when disabled kids are asked to “make do,” every single day

It’s tempting to read this story as a feel-good innovation and it is moving. But it also exposes what’s broken.

If a tactile yearbook feels revolutionary, it’s because the baseline is so low.

Across countries and school systems, disabled children are regularly asked to compromise, to accept partial access, delayed access, or “alternative” experiences that are smaller and lonelier than what non-disabled peers receive.

The 3D yearbook refuses the idea that disabled people should only be included in the serious parts of life (education, employment, healthcare), while being excluded from the sentimental, cultural, everyday parts (photos, keepsakes, nostalgia, teenage rituals).

If you’re a teacher, school leader, designer, or policymaker reading this, don’t start by asking, “How do we accommodate?” Start by asking, “Who are we leaving out, and why did we think that was acceptable?”