**1. Introduction**

Museums have traditionally employed several methods to make their collections more accessible in support of the participation of blind and visually impaired people in arts and culture and to comply with laws [1,2] that protect the right to access art. For example, some leading art institutions [3–5] offer accessible "touch tours" and workshops similar to Art Beyond Sight [6] and the Mind's Eye Program [7] where participants can experience art by touching some of the collection artworks while listening to tailored audio descriptions given by the staff. Two additional methods to support access are descriptive audio guides and accessible Braille leaflets of the artworks that may include embossed tactile graphic diagrams. Unfortunately, these methods have limitations. Accessible tours and workshops are available only on specific dates, schedules, and often must be reserved in advance. Moreover, they fail to support independent visits, exploration, and the artworks prepared for touch exploration are not the most prominent collection pieces due to the risk of damage [8]. Audio descriptions and accessible leaflets fail to convey much of the spatial information in the artwork. The latter also requires Braille proficiency, which remains low even in developed countries (about 5% in the UK [9] and less than 10% in the USA [10]).

Nowadays, the development and display of relief models of artworks made using low-cost digital fabrication techniques such as 3D printing are becoming an alternative for improving the accessibility to art. Several art institutions like the Prado Museum [11]

**Citation:** Cavazos Quero, L.; Iranzo Bartolomé, J.; Cho, J. Accessible Visual Artworks for Blind and Visually Impaired People: Comparing a Multimodal Approach with Tactile Graphics. *Electronics* **2021**, *10*, 297. https://doi.org/10.3390/ electronics10030297

Received: 12 November 2020 Accepted: 19 January 2021 Published: 26 January 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

**<sup>\*</sup>** Correspondence: jdcho@skku.edu

and The Andy Warhol Museum [12], among others, have pioneered the use of this alternative in their exhibitions. Compared to tactile graphic diagrams, they offer advantages like improved volume shape, depth, and more diverse texture representation. However, without any verbal descriptions, they might still be challenging to understand. Interactive multimodal guides (IMGs) combine modalities such as audio, tact, smell, flavor, or others to convey and communicate information. Doing so mitigates the individual modalities' shortcomings and complements their strengths.

In this work, we describe our approach to the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interactive multimodal guide for blind and visually impaired people that uses localized on-demand audio descriptions and tactile relief models to improve the independent access and understanding of visual artworks.
