Unseen City Canvases: Exploring Blind and Low Vision People's Perspectives on Urban and Public Art Accessibility
For HCI researchers and urban designers, this work expands urban accessibility research beyond navigation to include art engagement, offering concrete design guidelines for inclusive public art.
This paper explores how blind and low vision (BLV) people perceive and engage with urban public art, revealing that they value spontaneous exploration, multisensory engagement, and detailed descriptions of culturally significant works, while also facing challenges such as safety concerns, social disruption, and risks of cultural erasure from inaccurate AI descriptions. The study provides empirical insights and seven design dimensions for improving public art accessibility.
Public art can hold cultural, social, political, and aesthetic significance, enriching urban environments and promoting well-being. However, a majority of urban art is inaccessible to blind and low vision (BLV) people. Most art access research has focused on private and curated settings (e.g., museums, galleries) and most urban access work has centered on outdoor navigation, leaving urban and public art accessibility largely understudied. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 BLV participants, using design probes featuring AI-generated descriptions and real-time AI interactions to investigate preferences for both discovering and engaging with urban art. We found that BLV people valued spontaneous art exploration, multisensory (e.g., tactile, auditory, olfactory) engagement, and detailed descriptions of culturally significant artwork. Participants also highlighted challenges distinct to urban art contexts: safety took precedence over art exploration, multisensory access measures could be disruptive to others in the public space, and inaccurate AI descriptions could lead to cultural erasure. Our contributions include empirical insights on BLV preferences for urban art discovery and engagement, seven design dimensions for public art access solutions, and implications for expanding HCI urban accessibility research beyond navigation.