Abstract
Despite the use of tactile graphics and audio guides, blind and visually impaired people still face challenges to experience and understand visual artworks independently at art exhibitions. Art museums and other art places are increasingly exploring the use of interactive guides to make their collections more accessible. In this work, we describe our approach to an interactive multimodal guide prototype that uses audio and tactile modalities to improve the autonomous access to information and experience of visual artworks. The prototype is composed of a touch-sensitive 2.5D artwork relief model that can be freely explored by touch. Users can access localized verbal descriptions and audio by performing touch gestures on the surface while listening to themed background music along. We present the design requirements derived from a formative study realized with the help of eight blind and visually impaired participants, art museum and gallery staff, and artists. We extended the formative study by organizing two accessible art exhibitions. There, eighteen participants evaluated and compared multimodal and tactile graphic accessible exhibits. Results from a usability survey indicate that our multimodal approach is simple, easy to use, and improves confidence and independence when exploring visual artworks.
Highlights
Museums have traditionally employed several methods to make their collections more accessible in support of the participation of blind and visually impaired people in arts and culture and to comply with laws [1,2] that protect the right to access art
The first impression of the Interactive multimodal guides (IMGs) was much more exciting for the participants. They expressed surprise since, for most, it was the first time to use such a system, while reading tactile graphs was something they had already experienced. They eagerly expressed their desire to use both tactile graphics and IMG frequently at art galleries, and museums (Table 4-S1) and even demanded it, with expressions such as “EP13: I can’t understand why these are not available everywhere for every single artwork."
With the other one, I need to go and read the Braille and come back, and sometimes I get lost in the graphic or with the Braille." Having to switch between the Braille annotations, texture legends, and the tactile graphics was perceived as the largest factor to perceive the tactile graphics as unnecessarily complex (Table 4-S2)
Summary
Museums have traditionally employed several methods to make their collections more accessible in support of the participation of blind and visually impaired people in arts and culture and to comply with laws [1,2] that protect the right to access art. Two additional methods to support access are descriptive audio guides and accessible Braille leaflets of the artworks that may include embossed tactile graphic diagrams. Accessible tours and workshops are available only on specific dates, schedules, and often must be reserved in advance They fail to support independent visits, exploration, and the artworks prepared for touch exploration are not the most prominent collection pieces due to the risk of damage [8]. Audio descriptions and accessible leaflets fail to convey much of the spatial information in the artwork The latter requires Braille proficiency, which remains low even in developed countries (about 5% in the UK [9] and less than 10% in the USA [10])
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