Prototype Tool for Navigational Access within Museums for Blind and Visually Impaired
Dr. Nicholas Giudice (UMaine) and Dr. Stacy Doore (Bowdoin) recently described a new accessible tool for museum access in a paper presentation given at the Speaking of Location Workshop at the 2019 International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) in Regensburg, Germany.
The presented paper described a prototype system that has been developed to provide blind and visually impaired people with navigational assistance in museums. The system also provides accessible, multi-layered descriptions of the works in the museum. The research described elaborated the system and the process of how to parse the images using a sample painting as an exemplar of how different layers of description can be used to provide overview, spatial relations, and semantic context descriptions. The project was driven by advances in mobile technology, semantic querying, graph-based data structuring, and from input by blind end-users.
The citation to the in-press paper is:
Doore, S.A., Sarrazin, A.C., and Giudice, N.A. (in press). Natural-Language Scene Descriptions for Accessible Non-Visual Museum Exhibit Exploration and Engagement. Stock, K., Jones, C., & Tenbrink, T. (Eds.) In the Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 14th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2019). Regensburg, Germany, Springer International Publishing. An author’s preprint version is available.