Tactile colour pictogram to improve artwork appreciation of people with visual impairments

Abstract

A recent development in tactile technology enables an improvement in the appreciation of the visual arts for people with visual impairment (PVI). The tactile sense, in conjunction with, or a possibly as an alternative to, the auditory sense, would allow PVIs to approach artwork in a more self-driven and engaging way that would be difficult to achieve with just an auditory stimulus. Tactile colour pictograms (TCPs), which are raised geometric patterns, are ideographic characters that are designed to enable PVIs to identify colours and interpret information by touch. In this article, three TCPs are introduced to code colours in the Munsell colour system. Each colour pattern consists of a basic cell size of 10 mm × 10 mm to represent the patterns consistently in terms of regular shape. Each TCP consists of basic geometric patterns that are combined to create primary, secondary, and tertiary colour pictograms of shapes indicating colour hue, intensity and lightness. Each TCP represents 29 colours including six hues; they were then further expanded to represent 53 colours. Two of them did not increase the cell size, the other increased the cell size 1.5 times for some colours, such as yellow-orange, yellow, blue, and blue-purple. Our proposed TCPs use a slightly larger cell size compared to most tactile patterns currently used to indicate colour, but code for more colours. With user experience and identification tests, conducted with 23 visually impaired adults, the effectiveness of the TCPs suggests that they were helpful for the participants.

ColorWatch: Color Perceptual Spatial Tactile Interface for People with Visual Impairments

“…Adjacent color hues in this scheme are oriented at an angular distance of 20°, but research suggests that tactile accuracy for grating orientation is significantly distinguishable for 30°or 45°angle [14,15]. The Munsell color system based TCP schemes by using ideographic characters were proposed by Cho et al [16]. They employed an experimental investigation and adaption based approach for representing wide color gamut of 29 and 53 colors shades in the basic and extended versions for three TCP schemes, respectively.…”

Sound Coding Color to Improve Artwork Appreciation by People with Visual Impairments

“…In a similar way, VIVALDI and CLASSIC SCC are color codes expressed by sound, and visually impaired people learn these codes so that they can understand the color composition of the whole picture in a few minutes (e.g., it takes 3 min and 29 s in Table 4). Otherwise, it takes a lot of effort and time to read the tactile color pattern, as in [6], even with all 10 fingers, just like reading Braille. To listen to a wav file marked with (In Supplementary Materials), left-click the wav audio file and drag it to the computer screen; then right-click to enter the program menu and launch Windows Media Player.…”

“…In the tactile color pattern CELESTIAL [6], the light red pattern consists of three dots, the medium bright one consists of two dots, and the dark one consists of one dot. The light is symbolized as dots, and the more dots there are, the brighter it is.…”

“…First, they allow immediate access to color information through color patterns, just as a sighted person sees colors immediately. Second, embossing a TCP directly on a piece of artwork reproduction surface allows PVI to grasp color and color-related information (e.g., shape, size, brightness, and position) through tactile interaction [6].…”

Multi-Sensory Interaction for Blind and Visually Impaired People

“…The development of tactile and multisensory assistive technologies has expanded their opportunities to appreciate visual arts. Tactile color pictograms [4] using tactile sensing attain sensational conception along with the other physical properties of artwork, such as contour, size, texture, geometry, and orientation. Although several tactile color patterns [4] have been developed, they are limited to fixed tactile color interpretation, which requires outgoing resources.…”