Museums hold collections of objects. Interventions, such as audio descriptions, objects, and maps, make these accessible to the visitors with visual impairments but 2-dimensional objects, such as maps, photographs and paintings, can still present challenges. An inter-disciplinary project works to improve access to visual art works via audio and touch interfaces. The outputs include an improved understanding of the how to improve access to the art collections for the audience and a re-usable technology to deliver audio in a non-linear fashion to the audience within a gallery. We discuss the project's development strand. The steps taken, such as participatory and experimental approaches, are considered with the issues that arose whilst working on the software, such as improving the communication how touch is used to perceive the world and the difficulties this posed. We pose ongoing research questions for non-visual interaction.
This study investigated how museum visitors with very low or no vision perceived and processed tactile pictures and/or audio-descriptions of visual paintings. Two visual paintings were selected and a focus group was established ( N = 8). Qualitative interview and observation data were collected. This study found two types of museum visitors: those who explored the tactile picture first and those who rather listened to the audio-description. When exploring each element in the tactile picture, they all started by exploring the element’s global (shape) outline and, when struggling to recognise it, turned to the audio-description. They preferred the audio-description to start describing where their fingers were. Tactile texture attracted their attention, sparked their curiosity, and enabled them to create a mental image of the tactile picture, but also confused them. They preferred the global (element shape) outline to be straightened out, so that curves become angular, and texture only for targeting certain elements.
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