Abstract
All people should be able to experience museums, but there are barriers for people with visual impairments (VIs) including few museums that have accessibility accommodations and having to plan their visit. There are museum and technical efforts to supply accessible experiences, but they require curation by experts, making it difficult for these solutions to scale. To address this problem, we used the Art Beyond Sight (ABS) Accessibility Guidelines as a framework to develop mobile tasks to guide laypeople in composing accessible artwork descriptions. We compared the ratings of 31 people with VIs and four docents on curations from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk between two approaches: 1) baseline tasks inspired from prior museum HCI research, and 2) our designed tasks. Both people with VIs and docents rated the second descriptions higher than the first in understandability and adherence to the ABS Accessibility Guidelines. The second descriptions vivid details and orientation information. Our work shows the potential to bring these tasks to a museum space.
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Notes
- 1.
Our project had 10 artworks, but removed two due to errors in the survey of people with VIs.
- 2.
The research in which we based our BL_Emotions task had participants write emotions on paper while they moved around the museum [4]. Therefore, we chose mobile device.
- 3.
- 4.
The ABS Approach Artwork 3 had the descriptions but was missing the relative positions for ABS_General and ABS_Literal descriptions.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 General Overview: Subject, Form, and Color
1.2 Orient the Viewer with Directions
1.3 Use Specific Words
1.4 Provide Vivid Details
1.5 Refer to Other Senses as Analogues for Vision
1.6 Explain Intangible Concepts with Analogies
1.7 Encourage Understanding Through Reenactment
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Corbett, M., Malik, J., Smith, V.R., Rector, K. (2022). Designing Mobile Tasks to Improve Art Description Accessibility for People with Visual Impairments. In: Wölfel, M., Bernhardt, J., Thiel, S. (eds) ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. ArtsIT 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95531-1_16
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