ONE of the most annoying things about art galleries and museums is that you rarely get the chance to touch the works on display. Of course, there is an intellectual argument why this should be so — that art needs to be preserved for generations, not just for a few years — but something in me rebels against it nonetheless. After all, art invites such a full range of sensory responses that it seems churlish to refuse one the right to get right in there, hands, mouths and all.

Now the artist Bill Woodrow and Tate Modern have come up with an exhibition of works specifically designed to be touched. Raised Awareness is 23 drawings which have been produced by a special printing process to enable them to be “read” by visually impaired people.

“A few years ago Caro Howell, who was then working in the special education department at the Tate, gave a talk about the needs of the visually impaired,” says Woodrow. “Why, I thought, can’t blind people have access to complete and new works of art rather than just being given embossed sheets showing details of existing works?”

The artists were asked to produce drawings in black and white on an A3-sized piece of paper. These drawings were then put through a Minolta photocopying device that picks up on the black or dark areas of the drawing and copies these on to specially prepared paper in an embossed form than can be “read” with the fingertips.

The challenge to the artists — among them Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Lisa Milroy and Damien Hirst — was not inconsiderable. How could they convey a sense of their work and their signature style to individuals whose sensory landscape is mapped out entirely differently from fully sighted people? Their responses have been quite varied. Some, like Charlotte Verity, have produced drawings of great delicacy — a branch of berried fruits, for example, articulated with all the attention to detail that you would expect in a drawing produced for a sighted audience.

Other work — such as Roger Ackling’s deliberately crumpled sheet that requires seeing fingers to reconstruct the embossed grid printed on it by travelling up and down its miniature hills and valleys — have been designed not only with the visually impaired audience in mind but also in the hope that they will be stimulated by a tactile adventure that challenges their sense of spatial and textural relationships.

Hirst has submitted two sheets containing an identically sized circle filled with small dots: on one, the dots radiate evenly outwards from the circle’s centre. On the other, the circles are organised in a seemingly random fashion, and by comparing them you understand their difference. They are instantly recognisable as Hirst works.

Anish Kapoor, conversely, has produced a scene of raised finger-print-style whorls and plateaus that, while they do not look anything like one of his works, might suggest the mystery of his sculptures.

And some works, such as Thérèse Oulton’s beautiful triptych-style drawing, which reminds me somehow of Seurat seen through honey, will tax all but the most dextrous Braille reader.

My favourites are Woodrow’s own drawing of a pair of hands holding up a ship in a bottle — “It’s a metaphor for the way you can’t touch or feel the subject, something I sense sighted people might feel about reading art through touch” — and a sunny drawing of a lone fish in the sea by the late Terry Frost.

• Raised Awareness, Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 (020- 7887 8888) from July 19 to Sept 30