Accessible Art

Project Overview

Context

This is my master's thesis at New York University, Tandon School of Engineering.

Problem

The problem addressed in this participatory research is the lack of accessibility of visual art when displayed in a public setting like art shows and exhibitions. Currently, people with vision impairments and intellectual disabilities face challenges in understanding and engaging with art due to its complexity and reliance on sight.

• Literature Review

• Competitive Analysis

• Expert Interviews

• Workshops

• Prototyping

• User Testing

• Qualitative Data Analysis

1) Secondary Research

Understood what has been done in this area through literature review and competitive analysis and found certain gaps in the world of fine art

Goals of this research:

• Explore opportunities to make fine art more accessible to people with vision impairments and people with intellectual disabilities

• Understand the process in which artists at HeartShare create and understand art and develop a framework to work with them in this process of making art more accessible by creating Visual Descriptions (VDs) with the vision that one community helps the other community

Art has been a form of expression for a long time. Artists create different types of art which may or may not be simple enough for anyone to understand. The beauty of art is that a viewer is free to make their own meaning when they look at a piece.

But what about someone who has a vision impairment? or someone with an intellectual disability who may not perceive the typical way everyone else does?

Like Alt Text and Captions for digital images, why not create visual descriptions explaining the content and the story of a painting when it is displayed in a public setting?

Many places like museums do keep descriptions next to paintings, but this project is not about making a fancy worded description or the history of a painting, it is about creating a simple worded description describing the content or the story of a piece which can assist people with VIs and IDs to understand art better.

Goals:

• To get a sense of the general process of making, displaying, posting, advertising and selling art.

• To learn about the awareness around Visual Descriptions.

• To understand how artists like describing their own art pieces.

• To have a few versions of visual descriptions to test during the workshop.

Questions asked

• How long have you been painting and what forms of artwork do you usually work on?

• What comes to your mind when you hear ‘Visual Description of an art piece’?

• Do you name your art pieces? Do you make captions when you display them on any platform?

• What do you think about alt text, art captions and visual descriptions of art? 

• What are the things you would include in a visual description of an art piece assuming you are trying to explain your artwork to someone who has a vision impairment or an intellectual disability or is a 5 year old kid?

Observation and Outcome

Using the elements of an art piece discovered in this study, I created four versions of the Starry Night (painted by Van Gogh)

Elements :

• Color – Tone, temperature

• Shape - square, rectangle, dimensions 

• Texture, strokes, patterns

• Medium - not sure 

• Story -  type, content

Learnings:

It is not the best idea to say ‘How would you explain it to a Kid’, instead say ‘How would you explain it in simple words’

This is a picture of the Starry Night, painted by Van Gogh

Goals:

• To get feedback on the planned tasks make necessary changes to the agenda for the final workshop

• To make two final versions of visual descriptions to test during the final workshop

Agenda

• Quick Session on Visual Description, Caption, Alt Text: 5mins 

• Overview

• Explanation with differences between them

• Real time examples

• Explaining the importance of this research and a few use cases

• Activities:

• Try to paint something after hearing the visual description (everybody was given different versions of the descriptions) 

• Card Sort:

• Look at a painting and describe it in 5 words or phrases - artists can write the words or say them out loud or even act it out, any gesture using which they would want to describe that art piece

• We will mix up the responses of every artist and distribute 5 responses at random to each artist (eg: 4 artists will get 5 empty cards each to describe a piece, 20 cards in total, after the cards are filled with responses, we would jumble the cards up and assign 5 cards to each artist at random)

• The next task for every artist would be to select their top 2 cards to describe that painting - choose 2 out of the 5

• Name an art piece - make a title for a piece (everyone was given a different painting)

• Briefly describe one of your own art pieces or look up a piece that you like and describe that in a way that it is very easy to understand

Painting Task

1. Choose a less famous painting
2. Think of a better way to describe the task
3. Read aloud the description
4. We need more than 2 mins for the task
5. We should assign descriptions to groups if we want them to do different ones
6. We should use simpler words in the description
7. Types of strokes - need to give them a description of these. Maybe a glossary of difficult words as well? Or is that too much?
8. We should describe if the painting is horizontal or vertical

5-Word Description Task

1. We need to specify "feel free to describe the form/content/colors, etc."
2. We need 5 mins for this task
3. We probably shouldn't use stickies (they're hard to fold and could be annoying for people with sensory disabilities). Let's get small straps of paper instead?
4. 4 mins (it took this long)

Long Description Task

1. "Use words" - I feel like we can phrase this better so that non-verbal artists feel comfortable
2. Subjective words, phenomena/lingo.. are they allowed/encouraged to use this in their descriptions? Or is it purely visual?
3. "5 year old" - maybe we can rephrase this too? It could come off as insensitive depending on the context
4. Emotional descriptions are also important

Goals

• To understand what elements of art matter the most when artists look at a piece of art, what things they observe instantly

• To learn how artists would explain a piece of art

• To understand how art show organizers can work with artists with disabilities to create visual descriptions of their art pieces

Agenda Slides

Workshop Observations

How did they name the paintings? Different pieces were given to the artists

• Jungle, forest

• New York City

• A story

• The bird

• Water 

• Girl, hair

Elements that the artists covered:

• Content 

• Adjectives, they expressed how they felt about the painting 

• Details 

• Mood 

• Color

Painting activities

Artist drew their own versions of the Starry Night

The first description (easier, clear worded) - Less time taken

Second Description (simplified version of a museum description) - More time taken

How did the artists describe a painting?

• Woman 

• Gorgeous neck

• Lovely chin

• Gorgeous

• Lip

• Feel happy

• Lovely hair

• Beautiful face

• Hair

• Hair

• Butterfly

• Beautiful 

• Happy

• Person

• One woman 

• Face

• Black eyes

• Expressions

• Butterfly

• Blue

Art created by the artists

How do we collaborate with HeartShare Artists to create Visual Descriptions of the art pieces made by them?

When artists were asked to describe a piece, their responses fell under the following themes:

• Content, physical characteristics of subjects

• Details, identified significant elements 

• Mood, feel, emotions attached to the piece

• Color

They were very expressive and used adjectives to describe details like ‘gorgeous chin’, ‘beautiful face’.

So, the first step can be to let the artists look at their painting for a minute or two after they have finished painting and give them time to open up and think about their panting.

Then we can start by telling them how beautiful we think the painting is and ask them different questions about the content with an attempt to identify the important characteristics of subjects (if any) and to get their story:

• What made you paint this today?

• Is there a story behind this painting? [Can be reframed by asking specific questions about their content, like if they have used bright colors, we can ask them ‘how did you feel like using these colors today?’]

• What are you painting today?

• Oh this looks so good, is there a reason why you chose these colors for this painting?

• Does this painting remind you of something?

• How did you feel while painting this?

• What do you see in the painting? [Can be reframed to ask about the content of their painting]

• Did you paint it for yourself or is it a gift for someone else?

• How would you name this painting?

• During the task of recreating ‘Water Lilies’, HS artists were asked why might Monet have painted that? One artist said ‘Because he wanted to drink’ - This was not their painting, but they still managed to create a story around it, so it depends on the questions we ask, the right questions will encourage them to tell us the story of their own art

• Even though the scope of this research was only Fine Art, we tested this out during a weaving session by conducting small interviews with HeartShare Artists and we were able to get the stories with most of them. On asking them about what they were making, they said things like:

  • “This is like easter, fun time of the year”

  • “I had a clear vision, to make it cute and lovely”

  • “This is a Steering Wheel, it has everything”

  • “Rainbow colors, sky blue, relaxes me, takes stuff off of my mind, colors of the dawn”

  • “Colors”

  • “I have used different yarns, to bring out the light blue, shape, triangle, the wheel draw, didn’t think my daughter would like it, but she did”

• I am collaborating with HeartShare and their artists to create visual descriptions of 10 pieces for their next art show in April 2023.