Words show the art to those who can’t see it

Museums create audio tours for visually impaired lovers of culture

“Look, but don’t touch” has long been one of the tenets of interacting with fine art, from great works of painting to sculpture, for obvious reasons. But where does that leave museumgoers for whom seeing is limited or impossible?

Expanding the descriptions of artworks on museums’ websites and audio tours is perhaps the most significant way these institutions are becoming more accessible to people with a range of vision conditions, from partially sighted to completely blind. At the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the Legion of Honor and de Young Museum, a traditional artwork audio description runs about 250 words, while the expanded texts may be as many as 330. In several Bay Area museums, work on making those descriptions more inclusive is a priority.

“When we started the process, we had a blank slate,” said Karen Berniker, FAMSF’s manager of access programs. “The challenge was we only had so many words to do it in, so they needed to be the right words.”

These texts need to address specific elements to help vision-impaired museum visitors create a picture of the work in their minds — and having a member of that community involved in the process is key.

To that end, Berniker enlisted museum volunteer Dr. Stanley Yarnell to evaluate the existing audio descriptions. Yarnell, 74, began losing his vision when he was 20. By the time he was 50, Yarnell, for whom “visual art has always been an important part of my life and travel,” had completely lost his sight. He retired from his specialty in physical medicine and rehabilitation a few years later.

For years, Yarnell depended on general audio tours at museums, and found that while they would discuss the context of the work, they often lacked a description of the work’s content.

But Yarnell, who began volunteering with the museums in 2017, said, “I was really engaged in spite of the fact that I couldn’t see, but it was because my partner was being forced, on the spot, to create a kind of audio description (for me). Not everyone has that.”

To better address these needs, in 2015 Yarnell started the Blind Posse, an informal network of people connected through social media working to improve access for the vision-impaired in Bay Area art museums. In addition to the de Young and Legion of Honor, the Blind Posse has worked with the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Craft and Design, and Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco as well as the Palo Alto Arts Center and Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection on the Peninsula.

The Blind Posse has five primary objectives:

Encouraging museums to create audio descriptions

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Edgar Degas, “Seated Bather Drying her Neck,” circa 1905-1910, is one of the works in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s permanent collection with an expanded audio description for the vision impaired. “With the perspective of a voyeur, we look down upon an unclothed woman seated on a low chair,” the description reads in part. “She’s facing away from us, toward the right side of the image. Whitish fabric — perhaps a towel — is draped over her chair, concealing her lower back and buttocks. She bends her head forward, raising her left arm to hold up her long red hair, as she dries the back of her neck with another white towel held in her right hand. The towel drapes down toward the floor, hiding her knees and lower legs.”