RAPID PROTOTYPING FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE ACCESSIBILITY TO CULTURAL HERITAGE FOR BLIND PEOPLE

Abstract. The extension of accessibility of CH to disabled people is a current topic of great importance. Today, there exist a lot of ongoing projects aimed at the extension of accessibility using the most recent and low cost technologies to improve accessibility to CH. One of the technologies, today available that can help to improve accessibility to CH, is certainly rapid prototyping. The main goal of the research here illustrated is the application of rapid prototyping for the extension of accessibility of Cultural Heritage (CH) to blind and visually impaired people. This document reports an experiment that compared the effectiveness of different 3D models for the introduction of blind and visually impaired people to the tactile use of models of monuments. In addition, this study focuses on defining standards and guidelines regarding features of 3D models, e.g. print resolution, in order to obtain greater legibility of models at different scales by the blind or visually impaired people. This paper shows a part of a wider Interreg EU research project, named I-ACCESS, aimed to study accessibility problems and solutions for CH. The experiments conducted with the sample of disabled people, allowed to obtain results on the most suitable printing parameters to be used.