Abstract:

Inclusive education is a term meaning that students with severe disabilities receive their education within the regular education environment. Vision is the most primary sense on which learning and education is based. For the students with visual impairments, there should be provided special materials (the most common ones being the books in Braille) and services, as well as specialized technology that will substantiate equal access to the curricula and information available to the other students. The availability of the otherwise unreachable information will equalize the chances to succeed, making them competitive in school and later in life.

Most of the visual arts, like drawing and painting, are hardly accessible to the persons with visual impairments. The project ARTouch was designed to address the needs of people with visual and hearing impairments in order to facilitate the understanding of art and the active participation in creating new meanings for all audiences. The paper describes the solutions chosen at the National Museum of Art of Romania for the Paul Signac’s painting Gate (Saint-Tropez) and for the Guercino’s painting Saint Benedict and Saint Francis. Two applications developed for Android for the visually impaired persons help the visitors to explore the paintings by listening to information about the Gate painting and Signac’s relation to Neo-Impressionism or about Guercino and his painting. The language can be chosen from Romanian, French and English, while the explanations are complemented by appropriate music pieces in an attempt to suggest sound-related images. Touch-sensitive areas broadly delineate picture planes in order to confer additional information about the paintings. This synesthetic experience would like to help blind and partially sighted to perceive fine art and to learn from visual information by acting on the other senses.

Keywords:

Vision impaired, painting, synesthesia in art.