Research

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 on the summary page and in the full academic paper.

To address the problems above, we developed software for an Augmented Reality (AR) headset that offers hands-free, real-time visual enhancements. This software allows users to customise enhancements in contrast, colour, magnification, and shape outlining, tailored to their needs.

We are currently testing these visualisations at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, gathering participant feedback to refine and improve the software further. 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. However, we need more participants with varied eyesight to understand more about how differences in eyesight affect the perceived benefits of these visualisations.

This work is part of my PhD, which is supervised by Dr Nervo Verdezoto Dias, Professor Yukun Lai  and Professor Tom Margrain.

Prior to my current work, above, my research at University of the West of England 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.