Art paintings accessible to the blind

The purpose of the article is to explore in what ways visual arts can be brought closer to blind persons in the postmodern society, in which sight is perceived to be the highest of the senses and in which most information is based on images. The basic methods of presenting a work of art involve the remaining senses, mostly those of hearing and of touch. It is of course not enough just to deliver a factual description of a painting or to transform it into tactile graphics – more complex techniques such as audio-description, method of associations, participating in role-playing, all with the aim of a holistic experience of the work of art, must be sought instead.

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

Currently, a large amount of information is presented graphically. However, visually impaired individuals do not have access to visual information. Instead, they depend on tactile illustrations—raised lines, textures, and elevated graphics that are felt through touch—to perceive geometric and various other objects in textbooks. Tactile graphics are considered an important factor for students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields seeking a quality education because teaching materials in these fields are frequently conveyed with diagrams and geometric figures. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify the current state of research in the field of automatic tactile graphics generation. Over 250 original research papers were screened and the most appropriate studies on automatic tactile graphic generation over the last six years were classified. The reviewed studies explained numerous current solutions in static and dynamic tactile graphics generation using conventional computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms, such as refreshable tactile displays for education and machine learning models for tactile graphics classification. However, the price of refreshable tactile displays is still prohibitively expensive for low- and middle-income users, and the lack of training datasets for the machine learning model remains a problem.

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

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.