Crowdsourcing descriptions of visual works of art for blind and partially sighted people

Access to art is very important to many blind and partially sighted people and they want to learn about aspects of art the same as that of sighted people. Some museums and art galleries provide audio guides and tours for blind and partially sighted visitors, but images of artworks on their website are generally not accessible. This project explored the possibility of crowdsourcing descriptions of artworks for blind and partially sighted people. An existing set of guidelines was revised and then in Study 1, was evaluated by 18 people working in the art world and 10 blind and partially sighted people using a Delphi method. The guidelines were then extensively revised. In Study 2, a crowdsourcing study, 23 members of the public interested in art created three descriptions of works of art using the new set of guidelines and provided feedback about the guidelines and their experience. Finally in Study 3, the 10 blind and partially sighted participants from Study 1 were asked to evaluate three descriptions of the artworks. The results showed that the refined set of guidelines were moderately easy to understand, moderately well organised and moderately detailed and the examples were very useful in creating descriptions for artworks for blind and partially sighted people. The results also showed that the participants felt very confident in creating descriptions with the help of the guidelines. Interestingly, whether or not participants had prior experience with people who are blind or partially sighted had no impact on the quality of their descriptions