Art accessibility for blind people: a process to create and understand photography

Cultural spaces like art galleries or museums are, in general, not accessible to blind or low vision visitors. Most of them do not have haptic support or when it has, the users do not have the experience to understand adapted art. This paper proposes a process to improve accessibility to visual art by for blind people improving knowledge on the creation and interpretation of photography. Initially, a photography workshop was applied to a group of three individuals with different levels of visual impairment. In the first part, researchers explained the basic concepts of photography like composing, lighting, and camera. Then, the participants choose their subjects and captured images. After the workshop, the research team built six haptic plaster pieces. Later, a final meeting and a public exhibition took place to collect users feedback and show their final results. With this process, we provide a path to improve the autonomy of blind people on image reading, photographic production, and haptic perception, giving them tools to interpret not just their captured images, but different visual art, using their own experiences. This work can also be extended to understand the challenges of image/haptic based interfaces for people with low vision.