Want news on our latest releases, heart-warming stories of our impact, wholesome content and opportunities to support our unique work?
Join our community of friends to receive updates to your inbox.
Beyond picture books at Living Paintings
29th April 2025
Though we are best known for our Touch to See picture books, there’s so much more to the Living Paintings catalogue. We have a whole world of tactile-audio boxsets to help blind children visualise the world around them, and we’re celebrating them for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which takes place on May 15th.
These boxsets are fantastic learning tools for teachers, as it means that any blind and visually impaired pupils are supported in all their classes – whether it’s history, science, geography, art, or music, Living Paintings has you covered!
Not only do we cater to blind and visually impaired children as a natural progression from picture books, we also offer teenagers and adults their own unique catalogue of boxsets which align more with their interests, including film and music, art history, and architecture. There really is something for everyone.
But what’s included in a Living Paintings boxset? We’re glad you asked.
1. Raised tactile images
We help blind people interpret images by engaging their sense of touch. Raised images help little fingers understand more fully the details of an image that may be difficult to explain. Whether it’s something simple like the Olympic rings, or as complex as a Rembrandt painting, our raised images mean that, for blind and visually impaired people, access to the visual world is right at their fingertips!
2. Audio descriptive guide
Our audio descriptive guides provide an immersive and atmospheric backdrop, guiding fingers over the raised images and helping them see through touch. While doing so, readers can listen to the fascinating insight stored on every audio guide, meaning that the images become more than just images – they’re the basis for furthering understanding.
All audio descriptive guides can be streamed on your Living Paintings library account – for the physical media fans, don’t worry: they’re also available on USB and CD.
Listen to a snippet from the Nature of Britain Album (read by Chris Packham, no less!) to see how our guide bring the world of the image to life – in this case, it’s a lovely, little otter!
Audio descriptive guide – Otter
3. Accessible activities
Many of our boxsets also contain additional accessible activities catered specifically for blind and visually impaired children, bringing them into the fun of hands-on learning. For sighted children, some of the most fun had in school is through exciting science experiments – who can forget Elephant’s Toothpaste? – so our Science Alive! set has science experiments that blind and visually impaired children can really get involved with! In the same vein, our My Art and Craft Book has an assortment of craft materials, so blind children can get stuck in with arts and crafts.
Ultimately, by engaging blind and visually impaired children and young people into the fun of learning through a way that is truly accessible to them, it helps them understand the world, and themselves, in a far more robust and positive way.
Your work makes a huge positive impact on my son’s life. I wanted to share that he just got 7 grade 9’s at GCSE and two Grade 8’s…he is completely blind! He could never have done this without having access to your resources over the years throughout his school career.
The history resources on WW2 related directly to the curriculum in Year 5 and 6. My pupil was able to learn alongside his sighted peers using resources produced to perfectly meet his needs. He particularly enjoyed chatting with his class partner about what he had learnt about evacuees.
I’m a teaching assistant for two VI children. Thank you for helping these children understand other people’s lives, other stories’ concepts, and topics. It helps them learn language skills, and they now like asking good questions!
If you’re a library member and you haven’t explored our wonderful range of boxsets, please do so! Remember: it’s COMPLETELY FREE for members, so don’t miss out.