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.

视力障碍者和有视觉障碍的人一样对艺术品感兴趣，但他们的经验仅限于在某些博物馆展出的精选艺术品。为了使视力障碍者可以轻松地访问和欣赏尽可能多的艺术品，我们提出了一个在线美术馆，该美术馆允许用户浏览基于触摸屏的设备上显示的绘画的不同部分，同时聆听对被触摸者的口头描述。屏幕上的一部分。为了研究我们方法的可扩展性，我们首先探讨了可能没有艺术专长的匿名人群是否能够提供艺术品的视觉描述作为初步研究。然后，我们与9位有视觉障碍的参与者进行了一项用户研究，通过评估系统是否以及如何很好地支持Feldman批评模型的4个步骤，来探索我们的系统对独立艺术品欣赏的潜力。研究结果表明，由匿名人群生产的艺术品的视觉描述足以使有视觉障碍的人以自己的判断来解释和欣赏绘画，这与专注于传递由艺术专家撰写的描述和观点的现有方法不同。根据从研究中获得的经验教训，我们计划收集对大量艺术品的视觉描述，并公开分发我们的在线美术馆，以使视障人士可以使用更多绘画。