Making Sense of Art: Access for Gallery Visitors with Vision Impairments

While there is widespread recognition of the need to provide people with vision impairments (PVI) equitable access to cultural institutions such as art galleries, this is not easy. We present the results of a collaboration with a regional art gallery who wished to open their collection to PVIs in the local community. We describe a novel model that provides three different ways of accessing the gallery, depending upon visual acuity and mobility: virtual tours, self-guided tours and guided tours. As far as possible the model supports autonomous exploration by PVIs. It was informed by a value sensitive design exploration of the values and value conflicts of the primary stakeholders.