For a period of time in the early 1990's, the HowTek Pixelmaster wax jet color printer was available with a modification that permitted a thick layer of the printer's polymer ink to be deposited. The printed images had a height of almost 0.010 inches. Although this height is much lower than the standard braille dot height of 0.025 inches, it was thick enough to be a useful tool for making 2D tactile pictures. Unfortunately the product failed on the commercial market, and at the present time, there is no commercially-available computer printer capable of making a tactile printout of a quality useful to blind people.
Until a usable and affordable tactile computer printer becomes commercially available, the only practical small-scale method by which a computer image may be transformed into a high-resolution 2D tactile picture is by using swell paper. Most computer printers heat the paper too much to allow direct printing on swell paper, so the computer image is normally printed onto regular paper, and the image is transformed into a tactile picture by methods described in the previous section.
Most braille printers may be switched into a mode for printing graphic images in the form of braille dots. Many of them have high resolution modes that print dots on a grid with dot-to-dot spacing of order 0.08 inches or less. Images printed with small dot spacing feel markedly smoother than those with the standard braille dot spacing of 0.1 inch.
Braille graphic images even with small dot-spacing are not as universally useful as high-resolution images made by other methods. Even so, braille graphic resolution can be very effective for many purposes. A few computer programs intended for production of braille graphics, many of which are usable by blind people, are described in the following section.