Supporting Object-level Exploration of Artworks by Touch for People with Visual Impairments

One of the reasons that people with visual impairments have difficulties in enjoying artworks is the limited number of accessible artworks. To enable people with visual impairments to explore and understand various artworks independently, we built a touchscreen-based mobile application as a prototype focusing on 2D paintings which plays object-level verbal descriptions upon users' touch. To confirm the needs and to collect initial feedback from potential users of such a system, we conducted an exploratory study with 8 participants with visual impairments using the prototype as a design probe. Overall, participants appreciated the prototype as they can learn artworks with less physical and time constraints while listening for details of contents as they explore each painting by touch.