"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints, not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
One of the 20th century's greatest painters, Picasso, believed that art was more than merely imitating what the eyes see.
Now, London's Tate Modern gallery has launched a new online art resource to help visually impaired people explore key concepts in modern art.
The project, i-Map, complements the Tate's current exhibition, "Matisse Picasso," by focusing on three pairs of works by the artists that explore their innovations, influences and personal motivations.
In many museums, blind visitors are denied the right to touch because they might damage fragile, centuries-old masterpieces.
"There are few online cultural resources specifically designed for visually impaired users that we are aware of," said Catherine Hillis, Talking Images Arts and Heritage officer for the Royal National Institute of the Blind.
With the exception of museums like the Louvre and the British Museum, tactile exhibitions for the blind are difficult to come by.
"Clearly, museums cannot offer tactile access to the majority of their original artworks," said Caro Howell, Tate Modern's curator of special projects. "But in the case of modern and contemporary art, it is often the conceptual content that is of primary importance.
"For visually impaired people to engage with art history, they have to be given full critical access. This requires that art's complex visual systems, experiments and innovations are revealed in ways that are meaningful, regardless of the degree of sight loss. So resources like i-Map are (an) essential component in meeting this challenge," Howell added.
I-Map is a permanent resource that will be available after the "Matisse Picasso" exhibition finishes. The site will eventually include work by other artists.
With text, image enhancement, animation and raised images, i-Map will serve partially sighted and blind people with a general interest in art, as well as art teachers and their visually impaired students.
Text reader software is required for visually impaired users to access the site. However, text-enlarger software can also be used if a partially sighted user prefers.
Since oral information is difficult to remember and text-reader software lacks intonation and pacing, i-Map includes explanations of complex visual systems like perspective or cubism for people who are congenitally blind or have a limited knowledge of art.
People who are partially sighted often have difficulty grasping a complete image.
I-Map uses animation to "simplify, enlarge and pull out key elements of an artwork so that they can be studied in isolation before being replaced within the whole," Howell said.
"For the first time I am able to access pictures without a sighted person," said Isabella Murdoch, who used I-Map's text-only function to explore the site. "It allows me the freedom of choice to find out about a work of art at home and decide whether to visit or not."
For completely blind individuals, i-Map uses raised images alongside the text-only function. Users can print out the pages, which are numbered in Braille.
"The raised images anchor the audio description," Howell said. "They also enable blind people to have a more detailed and accurate sense of the art work and they provide tactile confirmation of their own mental image."
However, some implementation details may introduce minor problems, accessibility expert Kynn Bartlett said.
For example, text set in graphics or in fixed font sizes creates dificulties for users with visual impairments who set their browsers to larger font sizes.
Also, the printable versions of the raised pictures are only useful if users have access to a special type of paper and device, Bartlett said.
Once the raised drawings have been printed from the website (on A4 paper, the regular paper size for Europe) they need to be copied onto special "swell" paper and put through a machine that raises the lines.
However, swell paper costs around $1 a sheet -- with 24 pages of the printable pictures, printouts could be costly, critics say. The machine to create the raised images costs around $500.
A number of organizations in the U.K. have this equipment, including the Royal National Institute of the Blind. Visually impaired individuals who don't have easy access to these facilities can borrow a set of the raised drawings from the Tate.
"Some schools will have access to these resources, but many blind users will not," Bartlett said.
Still, even critics acknowledge that i-Map is a step in the right direction toward increasing accessibility.
"This is a great effort and a good start on making an accessible museum exhibit that can be used by people with visual disabilities," Bartlett said. "More websites need to take this kind of proactive action to realize that in the 21st century, audiences include people of all abilities and capabilities."
The online resource complements the Tate's onsite programs for the visually impaired, including touch tours where users explore sculpture and other two and three-dimensional works through raised images, handling objects, description and discussion.
