Supporting a Crowd-powered Accessible Online Art Gallery for People with Visual Impairments: A Feasibility Study

TL;DR

This study explores the feasibility of an online, crowd-powered art gallery enabling visually impaired users to explore and appreciate artworks through verbal descriptions and touch-based interaction, demonstrating promising results with non-expert crowd contributions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel online art gallery system that uses crowd-generated descriptions to help visually impaired users interpret artworks, showing its potential for scalable, accessible art appreciation.

Findings

Crowd-generated descriptions enable effective artwork interpretation.

Visually impaired users can independently appreciate paintings using the system.

The approach differs from expert-focused descriptions, emphasizing crowd input.

Abstract

While people with visual impairments are interested in artwork as much as their sighted peers, their experience is limited to few selective artworks that are exhibited at certain museums. To enable people with visual impairments to access and appreciate as many artworks as possible at ease, we propose an online art gallery that allows users to explore different parts of a painting displayed on their touchscreen-based devices while listening to corresponding verbal descriptions of the touched part on the screen. To investigate the scalability of our approach, we first explored if anonymous crowd who may not have expertise in art are capable of providing visual descriptions of artwork as a preliminary study. Then we conducted a user study with 9 participants with visual impairments to explore the potential of our system for independent artwork appreciation by assessing if and how well the system supports 4 steps of Feldman Model of Criticism. The findings suggest that visual descriptions of artworks produced by an anonymous crowd are sufficient for people with visual impairments to interpret and appreciate paintings with their own judgments which is different from existing approaches that focused on delivering descriptions and opinions written by art experts. Based on the lessons learned from the study, we plan to collect visual descriptions of a greater number of artwork and distribute our online art gallery publicly to make more paintings accessible for people with visual impairments.