Accessible Visual Artworks for Blind and Visually Impaired People: Comparing a Multimodal Approach with Tactile Graphics

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.

A Systematic Literature Review on the Automatic Creation of Tactile Graphics for the Blind and Visually Impaired

“…The system had some limitation: (1) the system required for specialized devices that were often costly; (2) the system required users to generate particular tactile graphics to the software because existing tactile graphics were not available to the current software; (3) considering that specialized devices were large, this limited the portability of the systems. Quero et al [64] presented an interactive multimodal guide prototype that consisted of a touch-sensitive 2.5D artwork relief model that used audio and tactile graphics to enhance independent access to visual information and knowledge of visual artworks. The current prototype was created for practice in an exhibition context.…”

“…School art teachers showed interest in applying the design as an educational instrument in the classroom. As a result of the analysis, additional audio feedback was proven to be an effective method for making it easier for BVI individuals to perceive tactile graphics [7,11,[51][52][53]61,64].…”

“…Travelling and tactile graphics 5 [35,36,[58][59][60] Map and audio guidance 3 [61][62][63] Artworks and object's shape 2 [64,65] Haptic and braille display 2 [31,66] Orientation and Mobility 1 [62] We identified types of input images to generate tactile graphics, as shown in Table 4. General images, such as natural scene images, were used the most (9 papers), followed by charts and diagrams (7 papers).…”

Construction of a Soundscape-Based Media Art Exhibition to Improve User Appreciation Experience by Using Deep Neural Networks

“…In a blind touch project, Cavazos et al [25] developed a multi-modal artwork guide platform (see Table 1) that transformed an existing 2D visual artwork into a 2.5D (relief form) replica using 3D printing technology, making it accessible through touch, audio descriptions, and sound in order to provide a high level of user experience. Thus, visually impaired individuals could enjoy this artwork freely, independently, and comfortably through touch and sound without the need for a professional commentator.…”

“…Table 1. Interactive multi-modal guideline for appreciating visual artworks and museum objects [25].…”