Low Vision Visitors

How Capption assists low-vision visitors

This summary encapsulates the research findings used to design Capption’s low-vision assistance features and prove Capption’s effectiveness for low-vision exhibit visitors.

An unseen affliction: the scale and depth of visual impairment

Ironically, another person’s visual impairment can rarely be seen. That doesn’t stop visual impairment from being an enormous under-discussed global health issue.

In the United States, 51.9 million adults over 18 report some trouble seeing. Of them, 47.9 million have mild trouble seeing even with glasses, 3.7 million report great difficulty seeing even with assistance, and 307,000 can’t see at all.

Globally, at least 2.2 billion people endure a near or distance vision impairment. 1 billion of those have an impairment that could’ve been prevented or hasn’t yet been addressed. The primary causes of those impairments are: presbyopia, cataracts, refractive errors, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy.

Levels of sightedness

You’re either blind or you’re not, right? Not quite. Visual impairment level isn’t neatly binary. Instead, a person’s visual acuity lies somewhere on the following spectrums:

Snellen scale of visual acuity

Most people are familiar with this from their optometry visits:

No impairment (20/20 to 20/30). Healthy vision.
Mild visual impairment (20/30 to 20/60). Can see most details, but often has difficulty with either up-close or distance vision.
Moderate visual impairment (20/70 to 20/160). Notable difficulty with distance vision and daily tasks. May require assistive aids.
Severe visual impairment (20/200 to 20/400). Legally blind. Limited ability to see details and recognize objects. Often requires assistance with daily activities.
Profound visual impairment (20/400+). Can only perceive light or shadows.
Blindness—no light perception, no vision whatsoever.

Sight disorders

Additionally, people of all visual acuities could be afflicted by a disease or disorder such as:

Peripheral field loss (glaucoma afflicts ~13% of Americans over 65)
Hemifield loss (hemaniopia—800,000 in USA)
Central field loss (19.8M in USA, 200M worldwide from age-related macular degeneration)
Cataracts (24.4M in USA)
Diabetic retinopathy (9.6M in USA)
CMV retinitis (often affects the immunocompromised)
Low contrast (prevalent but usually temporary)

Visualization capacity

Further, all of the above focuses on visual sensing impairment alone. One’s capacity to process and visualize plays a role, as well, at one of three levels:

Impaired vision. Can see, but has difficulty. Clearly knows and can visualize a given color or object.
Lost vision. Could see or see much better that currently. Knows what a color or object looks like, but may not be able to see them anymore.
Never sighted. “Visualization” capacity relies on their other senses to synthesize an detailed understanding of the physical world.

Each classification varies slightly depending on the country or organization defining it. All permanent visual impairments add up to at least 27% of the world population, and an even higher percentage of frequent museum and gallery visitors.

Unintentional exclusion

“We don’t have visually-impaired visitors.”
— One museum proprietor

We have actually heard that, and it couldn’t be less true.

A 2021 survey conducted by researchers at the wayfinding app Evelity found quite the opposite, in fact:

94% of visually-impaired respondents visit museum at least once a year, 49% visit more than 3 times per year.
8 out of 10 would visit more often if places, content, and works were more accessible.
6 out of 10 would visit much more often with improved accessibility.
People with severe or profound visual impairment depend on audio content, while those with mild, moderate, or temporary impairment prefer adapted text formats.
Critically, 70% haven’t considered themselves autonomous while in a museum.

What obstacles do visually impaired visitors face?

Lack of adapated content (81%—Capption’s target!)
Accessibility inside the museum (62%)
Lack of adapted tours (62%)
Accessibility of museum surroundings (51%)
Lack of information about content and accessibility support (40%)
Accessibility by public transport (34%)

Meanwhile, only 7-11% of exhibits contain any sort of accessibility feature, and most of those are specific to mobility access.

The invisible struggle: what low-vision visitors face

Imagine stepping into a bustling museum, excited to learn about an exhibit, but your limited visual acuity means that crowds, obstacles, and distances inhibit your access to knowledge that’s right there. For 94% of the people described in the previous section, that’s everyday reality at an exhibit.

Observable low-vision stressors

Prior to development, Capption researchers individually observed seven different low-vision visitors, each with varying impairments, make unaided visits to a museum/cultural center. We documented low-vision-specific anxiety-building events such as “walk-bys”, “get closes”, “standoffs”, “interferences” as they processed through the museum. Each visit yielded between 10 and 17 events.

It turns out that low-vision visitors fight through anxiety-increasing behaviors on an exhibit-by-exhibit basis. For emphasis, here’s one visitor’s 12 incident summary:

2 hummingbirds (see below)
1 outright refusal to engage
2 hover closes
1 crowd block
2 interferences with materials
1 missed the information placard altogether
2 person-on-person bumps
1 accidental photobomb

Walking around a museum with significantly-reduced visual acuity is to be bombarded with stimuli you have to manage but cannot focus on. It’s tough enough day-to-day, but places like museums amplify their difficulty.

Key coping behavior: the hummingbird

If you want to look for a telltale low-vision visitor behavior, search for the hummingbird.

A typical, fully-sighted exhibit visitor will view or interact with an exhibit object by:

Entering a room.
Scanning the room for objects of interest.
Moving toward that object of interest until it’s in focus.
Read any wall labels from the same standing position.
Mumble “cool” and move on.

To interact with the same exhibit, a visually-impaired visitor will most often perform the hummingbird maneuver, which unfolds like this:

Choose an approach vector.
Orient by landmark.
Discern the exhibit from the other visual information.
Choose inspection target.
Dip in for close inspection.
Visually process the exhibit object or label text.
Occupy space in front of the object of inquiry while processing.
Incur any stress resulting from re-indexing on text if they’ve previously lost their place.
Feel social anxiety about hogging space/inconveniencing others.
Feel physical challenges with stooping or other maneuvering.
Back off when anxiety or social pressure boils over or processing complete.
Repeat to continue an incomplete inspection, then reorient and reindex.
Note any failure for a potential return to the exhibit, if desired.

Many visually-impaired visitors’ actions appear executed under an omnipresent countdown timer, as though their performance is being (self-)judged by standards other (sighted) people meet.

Unwelcome stresses caused by the normative exhibit experience

“This place was designed for people like you!”

— Frustrated quote by a low-vision tester to the fully-sighted researcher

The traditional exhibit experience presents a cascade of challenges to low-vision visitors:

High cognitive load. Low-vision visitors must simultaneously manage unfamiliar surroundings, anxiety, navigation, and observation tactics, leading to increased stress and a reduction in their available attention for learning.
Physical and environmental barriers. Tiny fonts, poor lighting, glare on placards, and awkwardly-placed information force visitors to lean in closely, obscuring views for others while straining themselves. One low-vision tester noted, “Minimum visual distances matter with my sight”.
Confounding inconsistencies. Variations in label size, color, shape, and placement across an institution force constant reorientation and discernment, adding to cognitive stress.
Draining social anxiety. The fear of bumping into people, blocking others’ views, or appearing different heightens anxiety. Once stress levels peak, low-vision visitors begin actively avoiding engagement.

To visit an exhibition (a purpose-built stimulation space) with low or impaired vision is to invite all this into your day. Some quotes from testers:

“It’s a blur but it’d help to know what it was.”
“There’s a lot going on in front of that sign.”
“I’m afraid in this beautiful place.”

People who feel shut out in an exhibit setting for any reason enter skim mode, glossing over the very exhibits they came there to engage with.

Comprehension buckles under stress

In post-test interviews, unassisted low-vision testers’ exhibit learnings focused primarily on the physical facets of a given work or context like the building’s architecture, and much less on why the work or exhibit mattered. In other words, they mostly got the “whats” and not the “whys” or “hows”, both of which are impossible to divine without accompanying, accessible, adapted contextual content. For exhausted low-vision visitors, the lack of a palpable takeaway puts the cherry on top of their unsatisfactory experience. Consequently, without accessible content, most exhibitors will fail their educational objective for at least 25% of their potential visitors.

Critical insight for those facing sight challenges

As an assistive technology, Capption cannot simply solve the external problem of enhancing visual processing. It must also solve for the internal problem: the anxiety generated by the interaction between the visitor’s curiosity in conflict with their visual impairment plus their coping behaviors, the highly-stimulating exhibit environment, and the resultant barriers that ruin a visitor’s relaxed enjoyment.

Fortunately, reducing cognitive load below a visitor’s stress threshold doesn’t require an exhibitor to solve for all stress, just a component of their stress equation. Accessible content can take the anxious edge off a key piece of a low-vision visitor’s experience: exhibit comprehension. Doing so in a dignified way without singling out low-vision visitors for special treatment will help even more.

Stark contrast: how Capption transforms the low-vision experience

Capption shatters readability barrier by displaying text content in a hyperlegible font that they can size and manipulate as needed. The comprehension they now have access to makes the exhibit make sense. Critically, exhibits don’t have to be visually sharp or in focus to make sense, but they have to make sense to be engaging. Engagement decreases both anxiety and stress considerably and kills any background FOMO the visitor might have had about what they’d get from their.

As specifically and overwrought as possible, Capption improves the exhibit experience for visually impaired people by reducing the socioemotionally-driven anxious behaviors and physical compensations that accompany their engaging with exhibits…and looking “normal” while doing it.

What practical inclusion looks like for low-vision visitors

Every problem-solver focuses on the external problem of making text legible. When a low-vision user taps a Capption NFC tag to learn about an exhibit, that legibility’s really the third thing that happens psychologically. When your exhibit has Capption available, you give your low-vision visitors the following, in order:

Autonomy—exhibit content goes from yours to theirs without barriers gatekeeping knowledge.
Agency—mobile content lets them position comfortably.
Context—legible (or listenable) content makes comprehension possible.

They complete the picture. Exhibits don’t have to be visually sharp or in focus to make sense, but they have to make sense to be engaging. Engagement reduces anxiety and stress, killing FOMO about what they might get from a visit to an institution.

Features for low-vision visitors

Capption directly addresses the challenges identified in our research by providing exhibit content access that is immediate, in context, and respects individual needs:

Hyperlegible, customizable text. Capption delivers content in a hyperlegible font and allows users to adjust font size, line height, and display mode (light/dark mode) directly on their smartphone. This means users can tailor the reading experience to their precise visual acuity, reducing their cognitive load.
Portable content. Visitors can move away from crowds to a comfortable viewing position, read at their own pace, and alternate between viewing the exhibit and reading the description without constantly moving back and forth.
True accessiblity inheritance. Capption automatically applies a user’s system-level accessibility (and language) settings, providing a familiar and consistent experience.
Tested screen reader support. Experts from the Vision Loss Resource Center thoroughly audited Capption’s screen reader support, providing brutal feedback we incorporated to ensure Capption’s unrivaled screen reader support.
Audio content playback. In addition to screen reader support, every Capption supports audio file playback, offering another crucial format for engagement.
Instant access via NFC. Low-vision visitors simply tap a Capption tag using their smartphone’s onboard (NFC) technology to acquire content. This eliminates both the need to meticulously focus a camera application on a QR code (a task that requires good vision) and the need to struggle with an app search and download sequence. Even with perfectly-sighted, phone-addicted users, our side-by-side tests show NFC activation to be ~7x faster than QR code activation.
Seamless App Clip experience. For iOS users, Capption leverages App Clip technology, allowing instant access to content without requiring a full app download. For Android users, a single tag scan routes them directly to the Play Store download link for Capption, elminating any searching. Both significantly lower the barrier to entry and ensure a frictionless experience.

Proven effectiveness—Capption’s real-world impact

After development but prior to commericalization, we tested the effectiveness of Capption’s low-vision assistance features. The results were compelling:

100% comprehension success. With Capption-powered content, all testers achieved total comprehension of the exhibit subject matter, even those with significant visual impairments. This directly contrasted with unaided, pre-Capption trials where low-vision testers struggled to grasp the “why” behind exhibits without assistance.
Greatly reduced anxious behaviors. During Capption-assisted trials, exhibit-specific coping behaviors occurred far less often. Users were able to scan and then step to a more comfortable reading and exhibit viewing position. Hummingbird behavior was not observed.
Increased comfort and engagement. Low-vision testers reported feeling more comfortable, stating a “night and day” difference in their visit engagement levels.
Analytics demonstrate usage and utility. After debuting Capption, the first exhibit at a small museum showed 681 scans across 18 languages from just four tags. Their visitor services staff also received positive feedback from visitors who valued the assistance Capption provides.

Finally, direct quotes from low-vision testers say it better than we ever could:

“I can walk around with the information and not get in the way.”
“I had no idea what I was looking at but then I could see it once I knew what it was supposed to be.”
“I knew I was reading what everyone else was reading without having to be different or do different things.”

Ready to make your exhibits truly accessible?

The research is clear: low-vision visitors face significant, often unseen, barriers to engaging with exhibit content. Capption provides a dignified, effective, and easy-to-implement solution that empowers your visitors to explore their curiosity without stress or impediment. Get started with Capption today.