  While people with visual impairments are interested in artwork as much as
their sighted peers, their experience is limited to few selective artworks that
are exhibited at certain museums. To enable people with visual impairments to
access and appreciate as many artworks as possible at ease, we propose an
online art gallery that allows users to explore different parts of a painting
displayed on their touchscreen-based devices while listening to corresponding
verbal descriptions of the touched part on the screen. To investigate the
scalability of our approach, we first explored if anonymous crowd who may not
have expertise in art are capable of providing visual descriptions of artwork
as a preliminary study. Then we conducted a user study with 9 participants with
visual impairments to explore the potential of our system for independent
artwork appreciation by assessing if and how well the system supports 4 steps
of Feldman Model of Criticism. The findings suggest that visual descriptions of
artworks produced by an anonymous crowd are sufficient for people with visual
impairments to interpret and appreciate paintings with their own judgments
which is different from existing approaches that focused on delivering
descriptions and opinions written by art experts. Based on the lessons learned
from the study, we plan to collect visual descriptions of a greater number of
artwork and distribute our online art gallery publicly to make more paintings
accessible for people with visual impairments.
