Museums and art galleries are important spaces that offer us learning opportunities, social interaction, and a chance to explore beyond the confines of home. For people with visual impairments, most of whom have some useful sight (low vision), these spaces can be challenging. Common ways to help people with visual impairments engage with art include audio/verbal descriptions and occasionally options to touch a replica or original artwork. Whilst these non-visual strategies are helpful, we wanted to understand more about the visual challenges in museums. As such, we ran three focus groups with people with visual impairments, which highlighted difficulties in perceiving fine details caused by issues with size, distance, colour, contrast, and lighting. While non-visual interpretations, like audio descriptions, provide context and visual clues, people with low vision still build mental images of the art they cannot fully see and desire to use their residual vision. More information about these focus groups can be found in our publication or on the summary page.
To address the problems above, we developed ARtSee: An Augmented Reality (AR) headset that offers hands-free, real-time visual enhancements. ARtSee allows users to customise enhancements in contrast, colour, magnification, and shape outlining, tailored to their needs.
We have tested two iterations of ARtSee at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery gathering feedback from people with visual impairments to refine and improve the software further. There is a lot of data still to analyse, but early indications are promising, with participants stating that the visualisations are helpful to see more detail and colours than without the visualisations, and that they would want to use them again.
The work I describe above summises my PhD, which is now concluding. The results of this body of work will help inform my future research directions but please get in touch (paul3.goddard@uwe.ac.uk) if you have any relevant thoughts or may consider working together in some capacity.
All that’s left for the PhD now is to write it all up in a logical order, and so I am still supervised by Dr Nervo Verdezoto Dias, Professor Yukun Lai and Professor Tom Margrain until submission.
Prior to my current work, above, my research at University of the West of England (UWE) investigated how low-cost hardware could be used as an audio headset for people with low vision. Museum curators could write a description, and the software would automatically read these descriptions through the headset when triggered with a contactless tag. I also supported research into tactile and digital wayfinding for people with low vision. This research was in collaboration with Dr Benedict Gaster, Professor Carinna Parraman, and Fabio D’Agnano.
Publications
| 2026 | 2024 | 2021 | 2020 |
2026
Paul Goddard. 2026. Smart glasses bring art into focus for people with low vision. Visible Winter/Spring 2026. Sight Support West of England. Available at: https://www.sightsupportwest.org.uk/services/visible-magazine/13-winter-2026/
pdf
2024
Paul Goddard, Nervo Verdezoto, Tom H. Margrain, Yu-Kun Lai, and Parisa Eslambolchilar. 2024. Seeing Art Differently: Design Considerations to Improve Visual Art Engagement for People with Low Vision. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24), July 1–5, 2024, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660675
pdf | summary
2021
D’Agnano, F., Parraman, C., Goddard, P., and Roberton, N. 2021. Urban Lighthouses and a Tactile City - Bristol. In: AMPS Proceedings Series 26.2. Environments by Design: Health, Wellbeing and Place. Northumbria, UK. pp. 110-121.
pdf
Parraman, C., Mandrille, C., D’Agnano, F., Roberton, N., and Goddard, P. 2021. The Engaged Surface - Prints for Visual Sensory Perception. In: IMPACT 11. Hong Kong
online
2020
Goddard, P. and Gaster, B.R. 2020. PlayShell: a low-cost, fun audio experience for heritage centres. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Audio Mostly. Graz Austria: ACM, pp. 237–240. DOI: 10.1145/3411109.3411132
pdf | video