Engaging with Children's Artwork in Mixed Visual-Ability Families

Project Description

Artistic creation is intrinsic to childhood. Through art, children creatively express themselves, impacting happiness, social skills, intellectual development, and confdence. To support the joy and creativity that artistic expression fosters in children, it is important that parents and relatives engage with their children’s artwork. But there are open questions about how blind or low-vision (BLV) parents and relatives engage with their sighted children’s artwork, such as how they perceive visual art creations, provide encouragement and feedback, and what, if any, tools and techniques they might use to help them explore their children’s creative output.

To address these questions, we conducted two studies exploring how BLV family members engage with their sighted children’s artwork, strategies to support understanding and interpretation, and the potential role of technology, such as AI, therein. Through semi-structured interviews with AI descriptions of children’s artwork and multi-sensory design probes, we found that BLV family members value artwork engagement as a bonding opportunity, preferring the child’s storytelling and interpretation over other nonvisual representations. Additionally, despite some inaccuracies, BLV family members felt that AI-generated descriptions could facilitate dialogue with their children and aid self-guided art discovery. We close with specific design considerations for supporting artwork engagement in mixed visual-ability families, including enabling artwork access through various methods, supporting children’s corrections of AI output, and distinctions in context vs. content and interpretation vs. description of children’s artwork.