Photograph by Chris Von Holle
On a late September afternoon in the Dutch Room of Cincinnati Art Museum’s European Wing, three members of an art and accessibility team gather before Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of a Man in Armor.
Sara Birkofer, assistant director of gallery and accessibility programs, reads from a two-page description of the large oil painting from the early 1600s. “He is about human size, about the size a man would be, but he’s cut off at the legs,” she says. “The source of light is from his right, which casts a glare off the armor. The armor has black rivets and red trim scraps at his waist. The left hand clutches the handle of a sword secured in a holster. He stands upright as if confident and proud.”
David Grimes, the gray-haired member of the group, observes, “He sounds regal, like a lord or knight who’s high up in rank.” Adds Deanna Lewis, whose guide dog, a black Labrador retriever, sits at her feet, “Prominent in that era. A soldier going off to battle or just come back.”
Birkofer hands a replica helmet to Brian Anderson, third member of the tour, who wears red-tipped dreadlocks. He runs his hands over the narrow eye slits and rotating jaw. “Man, this is armor,” he says in his Southern accent, handing it to Grimes. “You’d have to be strong to be able to move in all this.”
The three aesthetes work at Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Grimes is proofreading supervisor of Clovernook’s braille printing operation, the highest volume producer in the world. Lewis is a bindery associate, one of 25 or so blind or visually impaired (BVI) Clovernook staffers. Anderson is arts and advocacy content creator and cohosts the nonprofit’s bimonthly podcast Boldly BVI.
The trio knows the museum well thanks to frequent, tailored tours. This is where low- and no-vision visitors like them can access detailed braille descriptions of artworks, hear audio descriptions via QR codes on their smartphones, or experience them in person during guided programs. A decade ago, accessibility for BVI visitors largely meant touch tours of objects you could hold. Paintings and photographs were off limits. Today, two-dimensional works are within reach.
Birkofer hands the group a tactile graphic of the painting, which is basically an embossed design—this one on an 8-by-11 sheet—conveying the painted image via raised lines, patterns, and textures. Background elements like a pillar or a curtain are simplified or removed so the main forms are more prominent. Tactile graphics are made on “swell paper” containing capsules of alcohol that expand when heated. More than just an outline, the raised portions are coded; dotted lines and other patterned forms create “keys” to translate the visual into touch.
Accessibility in the arts is a growing field, but few programs are as robust as the Cincinnati Art Museum’s. “The museum and Clovernook are reinventing accessibility,” says Tom Babinszki, founder of Even Grounds, a Cleveland-area accessibility consultancy. “I was so impressed by what Sara has done at CAM.”
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
If a client in the cultural realm wants to enhance their accessibility, he advises them, “Talk to Sara. If you’ve done that, you’ve seen everything. Even if you live at the end of the world, you won’t regret spending the money to come see what she’s done.”
Clovernook deserves half the credit as the museum’s principal partner for accessibility for the BVI community. Clovernook also collaborates with the Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Symphony, and Playhouse in the Park, among others, to make our city a national leader in inclusive design and experience for low-vision patrons—not just in programming and intel but also in the design and manufacture of materials such as tactile graphics and 3D models. The people on this tour have had a hand in making that happen.
Birkofer reanimated the museum’s touch tours when she was hired in 2014. Her job title changed in 2019 to incorporate the word accessibility. “The cultural accessibility field is growing,” she says. “There’s a changing mindset. Museums are deciding, We need to talk more about accessibility and have somebody dedicated to that on staff.”
As soon as she dipped her toe into the world of accessibility, Birkofer found herself drawn in and inspired by the people and the possibilities. She has a child with a disability, which strengthened her passion but is not its only source. “Art is a human right” reads a coaster on her desk.
Soon after Birkofer started, Samuel Foulkes—then Clovernook’s director of braille production—cold-called her. A paradigm shift followed. The museum now looks to the nonprofit world and art enthusiasts like Grimes, Lewis, and Anderson for ongoing guidance. The partnership is quietly but powerfully transforming accessibility in arts and culture, not just here in Cincinnati but nationally and even internationally.
Clovernook’s Arts & Accessibility Initiative, launched in 2017, has delivered accessibility products to more than 200 arts and cultural institutions, most outside Cincinnati—including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and Carnegie Hall—and has grown into the world’s largest and most significant arts and culture program that provides accessible materials for the blind to museums and cultural spaces.
Worldwide expansion wasn’t the aim of the visionary women who founded Clovernook more than a century ago. But as trailblazers themselves, they would have cheered the evolution.
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
Georgia Trader, who was blind, and her younger sister Florence were from a prominent Xenia family that had connections to William Procter, son of the P&G cofounder. He funded their purchase of the 28-acre Clovernook farm in North College Hill in 1903 to transform it into the Clovernook Home and School for the Blind, the first such establishment for BVI women in Ohio. Braille, the raised-dot code that allows BVI people to read, was adopted in the 1920s, though the Trader sisters were teaching it decades earlier through the Cincinnati Library Society for the Blind. They provided free books and classes for blind residents and launched the first program of eye examinations for children in the city’s public schools.
With an annual budget close to $10 million, Clovernook employs 80 people full-time, with fully one-third of them BVI. It pumps out more than 30 million braille pages annually, from books and magazines to 240,000 McDonald’s menus. Like its fellow nonprofit Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CABVI), Clovernook also operates local programs such as adaptive sports, summer camps, and a no-cost pediatric low vision clinic in partnership with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. CABVI offers local resources and assistance, while Clovernook’s purview is more global and focused on tangible products.
As the primary braille printer for the Library of Congress, Clovernook counts on federal contracts for the lion’s share of its mission-driven business. Though its presses continue to hum 40 hours a week, a chance opportunity in 2017 opened the door for a new kind of social enterprise: incubating tech-born accessibility products and solutions. Since braille readership of printed material has been in decline, the coincidental timing was auspicious.
The spark was simple: A small museum asked Clovernook for help with a show called Blind Spot: A Matter of Perception. At the Massillon Art & History Museum in northeast Ohio, the 2017 exhibition presented abstract paintings from the museum’s collection alongside new tactile versions. Intense colors became raised forms, brushwork was translated into edges, and spatial rhythms were represented by varied textures. An iPad app paired custom-composed audio to the art. Sighted visitors were invited to wear goggles that simulated low vision.
Foulkes said yes to the request without first running it by his higher-ups. “I asked for forgiveness, not permission,” he says, recalling that his wheelhouse at the time was squarely within the printing operation.
Clovernook created braille booklets, tactile maps, and accessible invitations for the exhibition and hosted an event for local BVI artists to create response artworks based on the pieces in the show, which were then incorporated as part of it.
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
Blind Spot won the Ohio Museum Association’s Best Exhibition Award. The prestigious accolade, in turn, led to grants to help create Clovernook’s Arts & Accessibility Initiative and a new title for Foulkes: director of braille printing and accessible innovation.
Clovernook’s design and production work has since blown up. For example, a small braille box surrounds a QR code on printed material to indicate where someone with low vision can click for audio content. This integration of access for the blind on something previously meant only for the sighted is a key part of Clovernook’s focus on inclusiveness.
For Cincinnati Opera’s Afrofuturist show Lalovavi, part of its 2026 summer season, Clovernook made 3D-printed action figures and tactile graphics of some of the elaborate costumes. “The program is heading beyond just a braille version of something,” says Foulkes, who has worked at Clovernook since graduating from college in 2012. “The goal is to un-silo accessibility products and solutions.”
This change benefits sighted people, too, as audio descriptions of gallery and museum artworks are popular with all patrons. 3D and pedagogical models for kids that incorporate braille and tactile graphics invite shared play and learning. And who wouldn’t want to play with an action figure of Persephone from the world premiere of Lalovavi? “This is not, Oh, let the poor blind person get access to a museum,” says Foulkes. “We’re trying to push back and start normalizing resources that will give blind and visually impaired folks the same access to culture, not some little add-on.”
According to the National Library of Medicine as of 2017, an estimated 7.08 million Americans are blind or visually impaired, with the number expected to increase over time, particularly as people age. One in three Americans will experience some form of disability in their lifetime. As accessibility becomes a bigger priority worldwide—to Foulkes, it’s a civil right—3D printing has burst on the scene as a game-changer because it’s cheaper, faster, and more customizable than older fabrication methods. Tactile graphics are a big improvement as well, but purpose-designed objects that can be iterated with user feedback, printed inexpensively, disassembled, played with, and cleaned have transformed what’s possible.
From maps and landmarks to sculptures, animals, and anatomy, 3D models convey complex information quickly and effectively. In the children’s book Juniper and the Red Swoosh, which Clovernook produced in parallel braille and print versions so sighted and low-vision kids can read together, a coin-stealing creature is paired with a 3D-printed abacus that lets BVI readers calculate the loot.
This kind of 3D printing also allows for self-determination in teaching materials among the institutions that use them. “I visited schools in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to see what the environment looked like and if they had materials,” says Foulkes. “Often they’d been sent materials from the U.S. that were not purposeful. It was random old books that were not culturally relevant, just extra stuff people had. There was a lack of any kind of kids books that children could connect with.”
For 3D printers, Clovernook designed models of local maps with gradient elevations and of heritage sites, such as Uganda’s Royal Tomb, that would be of interest in those classrooms. The printers are provided free of charge, and the designs are open-source and adaptable.
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
Clovernook’s new CEO, Jennifer DuBois, is enthusiastic about the Arts & Accessibility Initiative and the nonprofit’s talented team. “I’ve been inspired by Boldly BVI,” she says, referring to Anderson’s podcast. “I’m focused on bold solutions to the complex challenges visually impaired folks face. They can lead bold, engaged lives.”
That type of engagement is evident in another gathering of Clovernook employees I observe. Grimes and several others gather around a table to check out the latest product in development: a 3D model of the solar system that’s about three feet long, a foot deep, and eight inches high. Nine planets click into place—or space, as it were—their names indicated in braille on a plastic platform. “Tactile design has many elements, and this is a good example,” says Brennan Kinch, Clovernook’s access tech and tactile graphics specialist. There’s a raised asteroid belt, bumps for moons, and grooved rays indicating orbit paths.
Kinch and Grimes could have only dreamed of such an interactive gewgaw when they were in grade school. “It would have been better for me, really cool, to have 3D models like this,” says Kinch. Grimes adds, “We had a model of the solar system in eighth grade, but I only got to touch it one time.”
One of the most telling aspects of the solar system model is also one of its smallest. The pegs at the bottom of each detachable planet have a unique shape, allowing you to find a planet’s location in the lineup by matching it to the hole it slots into. After the design firm Form5 created the model in partnership with Clovernook, the Arts & Accessibility Initiative solicited feedback from a sample of end users.
“In a survey I did, someone said that what was referred to as an ‘oval’ did not feel oval to them,” says Blue Adams, copywriter and narrative specialist, who composes descriptions and teaching guides for the models. The oval in question was the peg connecting Uranus to the platform. “They thought an oval should be an elongated circle rounded on all sides, and this one was more like a rectangle with rounded small ends.”
That hair-splitting distinction—and the need to fix it—revealed just a piece of the unseen work behind accessible 3D design. It also underscored how a blind person’s tactile understanding can diverge from a sighted person’s visual assumptions and how a tiny difference can reshape comprehension.
At a nearby desk, Foulkes is plowing through e-mails between trips—just back from the International Conference on the Inclusive Museum in Spain, heading next to a book fair in Nairobi, Kenya. He swivels to say, “Fairly unique here is that all products and services are inclusively designed and prioritized,” meaning that BVI people are involved in every step. It sounds obvious, but in the field it’s a still new concept—yet another practice Clovernook is helping standardize.
The youth of the Arts & Accessibility team shouldn’t be underestimated. Foulkes and Anderson are just 35 years old. Adams and Senior Additive Design Engineer and Makerspace Manager Quentin Roa, sighted members of the team, are under 25. And Kinch, 27, is a tech-savvy BVI dreamer who demands a more inclusive future. He can’t see through the new Meta Ray Ban Display eyeglasses he just acquired, for instance, but utilizes them for hands-free use of the video recorder on his phone.
“I want GoodMaps to work with Meta to incorporate indoor GPS into the glasses,” he says, “so I can walk into a building and get to the exact room I need to.” He folds the glasses and puts them away. “As of right now, there’s not even a braille sign for the bathroom at the YMCA I go to.”
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