Understanding Visual Arts Experiences of Blind People

Visual arts play an important role in cultural life and provide access to social heritage and self-enrichment, but most visual arts are inaccessible to blind people. Researchers have explored different ways to enhance blind people’s access to visual arts (e.g., audio descriptions, tactile graphics). However, how blind people adopt these methods remains unknown. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 blind visual arts patrons to understand how they engage with visual artwork and the factors that influence their adoption of visual arts access methods. We further examined interview insights in a follow-up survey (N=220). We present: 1) current practices and challenges of accessing visual artwork in-person and online (e.g., Zoom tour), 2) motivation and cognition of perceiving visual arts (e.g., imagination), and 3) implications for designing visual arts access methods. Overall, our findings provide a roadmap for technology-based support for blind people’s visual arts experiences. Skip Supplemental Material Sectio

Tactile Media Consumption and Production for and by People Who Are Blind and Visually Impaired: A Design Research Investigation

The aim of this dissertation is to bring to light factors that affect how people who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) access, consume, design and produce with different types of tactile media for themselves or for others who are also BVI. Toward the goal of creating equity within the media and information landscape and beyond, this dissertation presents three interventionist studies to 1) identify the considerations and/or practices that people who are BVI engage in when consuming tactile media, producing (making, creating, designing) tactile media, and teaching with tactile media, and 2) identify design strategies that can be implemented to address the factors that limit BVI people’s tactile media consumption, creation, and instruction practices. Study 1 presents a user-centered design process that resulted in the creation of a 3D printed design probe, which solicited feedback from 28 parents, teachers, and other stakeholders about their familiarity with tactile pictures generally, and the prospect of 3D printing as a tactile media production technology. Study 2 presents a design ethnography focused on identifying how different stakeholder groups approach the task of designing tactile media; 67 community stakeholders representing six different stakeholder groups participated. Study 3 presents a Research Practice Partnership that designed and implemented three “Tactile Art and Graphics Symposia,” during which 41 BVI and 43 sighted individuals gathered to discuss the state of inclusion in tactile art and tactile graphics consumption and production. Findings from this study revealed five problems of practice impacting how people are positioned to engage in the consumption, production, and instruction of tactile media. This dissertation contributes important insights about the lived experiences and practices of people, BVI and sighted, who are using, creating, and instructing with tactile media for themselves and others

Engaging with Users and Stakeholders: The Emotional and the Personal

International audienceHCI and CSCW researchers and practitioners are increasingly working in complex social and political contexts where their research activities involve emotional labor and where they have to confront moral and emotional dilemmas. Given the potential impact of these challenging situations on the wellbeing of researchers in the field, there is much need for a discourse on affective impact of research on the researcher. In this workshop, we invite discussion and reflection on the experiences of distress and the role of informal coping mechanisms (e.g., personal narratives) to address them. We will create a forum where researchers and practitioners can discuss and share experiences of projects in sensitive settings and work towards guidelines to inform future projects

Sense-O-Nary: Exploring Children's Crossmodal Metaphors Through Playful Crossmodal Interactions

Metaphors enrich language by allowing us to express complex ideas through familiar concepts, enhancing both understanding and creativity in communication. Crossmodal metaphors are metaphors where one sensory modality is understood in terms of another (e.g, a sharp smell). Crossmodality is an integral part of how we make sense of and create meaning about the world. However, there is a lack of research on how children generate crossmodal metaphors and the interpretation of such metaphors. We present Sense-O-Nary, a game we designed to explore how children react when asked to create crossmodal metaphors in a novel environment. Children are presented with one sensory input and then asked to describe it using a different sense, for another team to guess what the original sensory input is. We engaged children (n=65, aged 8-10) to play this crossmodal metaphor generation game. We qualitatively analysed children’s exchange of crossmodal metaphors to define a set of crossmodal association strategies and then use this to categorise the metaphors they created. We discuss how engaging with crossmodal metaphors can enhance children’s linguistic development and how our findings can inform the design of interactions that involve multiple senses