Tag: accessible technology

Art Touch and Talk Tour Tech

CS4FN Banner

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

.What could a blind or partially-sighted person get from a visit to an art gallery? Quite a lot if the art gallery puts their mind to it. Even more if they make use of technology. So much so, we may all want the enhanced experience.

A sculpture of a head and shouldrers, heavily textured with a network of lines and points
Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay

The best art galleries provide special tours for blind and partially-sighted people. One kind involves a guide or curator explaining paintings and other works of art in depth. It is not exactly like a normal guided tour that might focus on the history or importance of a painting. The best will give both an overview of the history and importance whilst also giving a detailed description of the whole picture as well as the detail, emphasising how each part was painted. They might, for example, describe the brush strokes and technique as well as what is depicted. They help the viewer create a really detailed mental model of the painting.

One visually-impaired guide who now gives such tours at galleries such as Tate Britain, Lisa Squirrel, has argued that these tours give a much deeper and richer understanding of the art than a normal tour and certainly more than someone just looking at the pictures and reading the text as they wander around. Lisa studied Art History at university and before visiting a gallery herself reads lots and lots about the works and artists she will visit. She found that guided tours by sighted experts using guided hand movements in front of a painting helped her build really good internal models of the works in her mind. Combined with her extensive knowledge from reading, she wasn’t building just a picture of the image depicted but of the way it was painted too. She gained a deep understanding of the works she explored including what was special about them.

The other kind of tour art galleries provide is a touching tour. It involves blind and partially-sighted visitors being allowed to touch selected works of art as part of a guided tour where a curator also explains the art. Blind art lover, Georgina Kleege, has suggested that touch tours give a much richer experience than a normal tour, and should also be put on for all for this reason. It is again about more than just feeling the shape and so “working out its form that”seeing” what a sighted person would take in at a glance. It is about gaining a whole different sensory experience of the work: its texture, for example, not a lesser version just of what it looks like.

How might technology help? Well, the company, NeuroDigital Technologies, has developed a haptic glove system for the purpose. Haptic gloves are gloves that contain vibration pads that stimulate the skin of the person in different, very fine ways so as to fool the wearer’s brain into thinking it is touching things of different shapes and textures. Their system has over a thousand different vibration patterns to simulate different feelings of touching surfaces. They also contain sensors that determine the precise position of the gloves in space as the person moves their hands around.

The team behind the idea scanned several works of art using very accurate laser scanners that build up a 3D picture of the thing being scanned. From this they created a 3D model of the work. This then allowed a person wearing to feel as though they were touching the actual sculpture feeling all the detail. More than that the team could augment the experience to give enhanced feelings in places in shadow, for example, or to emphasise different parts of the work.

A similar system could be applied to historical artifacts too: allowing people to “feel” not just see the Rosetta Stone, for example. Perhaps it could also be applied to paintings to allow a person to feel the brush strokes in a way that could just not otherwise be done. This would give an enhanced version of the experience Lisa felt was so useful of having her hand guided in front of a painting and the brush strokes and areas being described. Different colours might also be coded with different vibration patterns in this way allowing a series of different enhanced touch tours of a painting, first exploring its colours, then its brush strokes, and so on.

What about talking tours? Can technology help there? AIs can already describe pictures, but early versions at least were trained on the descriptions people have given to images on the Internet: “a black cat sitting on top of the TV looking cute”, The Mona Lisa: a young woman staring at you”. That in itself wouldn’t cut it. Neither would training the AI on the normal brief descriptions on the gallery walls next to works of art. However, art books and websites are full of detail and more recent AIs can give very detailed descriptions of art works if asked. These descriptions include what the picture looks like overall, the components, colours, brushstrokes and composition, symbolism, historical context and more (at least for famous paintings). With specific training from curators and art historians the AIs will only get better. What is still missing for a blind person though from the kind of experience Lisa has when experiencing painting with a guide, is the link to the actual picture in space – having the guide move her hand in front of the painting as the parts are described. However, all that is needed to fill that gap is to combine a chat-based AI with a haptic glove system (and provide a way to link descriptions to spatial locations on the image). Then, the descriptions can be linked to positions of a hand moving in space in front of a virtual version of the picture. Combine that with the kind of system already invented to help blind people navigate, where vibrations on a walking stick indicate directions and times to turn, and the gloves can then not only give haptic sensations of the picture in front of the picture or sculpture, but also guide the person’s movement over it.

Whether you have such an experience in a gallery, in front of the work of art, or in your own front room, blind and partially sighted people could soon be getting much better experiences of art than sighted people. At which point, as Georgina Kleege, suggested for normal touch tours, everyone else will likely want the full “blind” experience too.

More on …

Magazines …

Front cover of CS4FN issue 29 - Diversity in Computing

Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.

This blog is funded through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.

Accessible Technology in the Voting Booth

CS4FN Banner

by Daniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London

Voting at an election: people deposting their voting slip
Image AI generated by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay

On Thursday 4th July 2024, millions of adults around the UK went to their local polling station to vote for their representative in the House of Commons. However, for the 18% of adults who have a disability, this can be considerably more challenging. While the right of voters to vote independently and secretly is so important, many blind and partially sighted people cannot do so without assistance. Thankfully this is changing, and this election was hailed as the most accessible yet. So how does technology enable blind and partially sighted people to vote independently?

 There are two main challenges when it comes to voting for blind and partially sighted people. The names of candidates are listed down the left-hand side, so firstly, a voter needs to find the row of the person who they want to vote for. They then, secondly, need to put a cross in the box to the right. The image below gives an example of what the ballot paper looks like:

A mock up of a "CS4FN" voting slip with candidates HOPPER, Grace TURING, Alan Mathison BENIOFF, Paul Anthony Lovelace, Ada

To solve the first problem, we can turn to audio. An audio device can be used to play a recording of the candidates as the appear on the ballot paper. Some charities also provide a phone number to call before the election, with a person who can read this list out. This is great, of course, but it does rely on the voter remembering the position of the person that they want to vote for. A blind or partially sighted voted is also allowed to use a text reader device, or perhaps a smart phone with a special app, to read out what is on the ballot paper in the booth.

Lots of blind and partially impaired people are able to read braille: a way of representing English words using bumps on the paper (read more about braille in this CS4FN article). One might think that this would solve all the problems, but, in fact, there is a requirement that all the ballot papers for each constituency have a standard design to ensure they can be counted efficiently and without error.

The solution to the second problem is far more practical: the excitingly named tactile voting device. This is a simple plastic device which is placed on top of the ballot paper. Each of the boxes on the ballot paper (as shown to the right of the image above), has a flap above it with its position number embossed on it. When the voter finds the number of the person they want to vote for, they simply turn over the flap, and are guided by a perfectly aligned square guide to where the box is. The voter can then use that guide to draw the cross in the box.

This whole process is considerably more complicated than it is for those without disabilities – and you might be thinking, “there must be an easier way!” Introducing the McGonagle Reader (MGR)! This device combines both solutions into one device that can be used in the voting booth. Like the tactile voting device, it has flaps which cover each of the boxes for drawing the cross. But, next to those, buttons, which, when pressed, read out the information of the candidate for that row. This can save lots of time, removing the need to remember the position of each candidate – a voter can simply go down the page and find who they want to vote for and turn over the correct flap.

When people have the right to vote, it is especially important to ensure that they have the ability to use that right. This means that no matter the cost or the logistics, everyone should have access to the tools they need to vote for their representative. Progress is now being made but a lot more work still needs to be done.

To help ensure this happens in future, the RNIB want to know the experiences of those who voted or didn’t vote in the UK 2024 general election – see the survey linked from the RNIB page here.

More on …

Magazines …

Front cover of CS4FN issue 29 - Diversity in Computing

Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.

This blog is funded through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.