Full and effective participation and inclusion in society is rightly one of the guiding principles underlying the UN Convention on Rights for Persons with Disabilities. While vision impaired school students in Australia are provided with accessible graphics for their education, there is a need for access to graphics in a much wider setting, including that of leisure and the arts.
As part of a broader initiative to improve the accessibility of the Bendigo Art Gallery, staff from the gallery have teamed up with Monash University’s SensiLab to create accessible versions of some of the most beloved pieces from their permanent collection. A range of technologies were explored, including 3D printing, 3D modelling and scanning, laser cutting, touch screen technology, along with more traditional tactile graphics and verbal descriptions. Extensive user testing was conducted in collaboration with Vision Australia.
Learn more about this project through the following paper:
Holloway, Marriott, Butler & Borning (2019) Making Sense of Art: Access for Gallery Visitors with Vision Impairments. Paper presented at the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.