Through the Women In Technology Scholarship program at Adobe, I had the incredible opportunity to intern at Adobe Research. While there, I worked with and was mentored by Jose Echevarria and JinJin Sun. My project focused on researching and designing a way for visually impaired artists to create digital art.
If you've ever interacted with a screen reader, you probably realize how difficult interacting with technology can be for someone with visual impairments. Currently, attempting to use a screen reader with a canvas based app (i.e. Adobe Fresco or Procreate) is nearly impossible. If you get through the difficulties of navigating the apps with a screen reader, you are then presented with the challenge of figuring out what you have drawn on the canvas.
I started by researching what visually impaired artists using tradional media did to make their artistic practice accessible to them. While each artist used a slightly different technique, the overall takeaway I had was that they were relying on feedback from their canvas. One artist used sewing pins, while another artist used varying sizes of blue-tac to figure out where on the canvas he was painting.
I have included some examples of visually impaired artists' work below.
The solution that I came to focused on two main factors. First, the artist had to know where they were on the canvas. Second, they had to know what had already been drawn on the canvas. The result of this was using auditory feedback as a substitution for the physical feedback tradional-media artists are already using. As technology changes, the solution can adapt to other types of feedback depending on what is widely available to the general consumer.
My work from this internship has now been issued a patent, "SYSTEMS FOR ACCESSIBLE DIGITAL PAINTING" US Patent No. 12,014,043. Thank you so much to my amazing mentors, Jose Echevarria and JinJin Sun.
