Design Principles for a Smart Descriptive Guide for Blind and Partially Sighted Visitors

This paper presents key design principles underpinning the design of a smart descriptive guide, that is, an interactive, customisable voice-driven guide that can provide audio descriptive guided tours, assistance, navigational information and answers to free-format questions for blind and partially sighted (BPS) visitors in various museum contexts. In collaboration with Titanic Belfast, a world-leading tourist attraction, we customised our smart descriptive guide system to create a Titanic Belfast Bot (TBot), for part of the Titanic Belfast experience. To evaluate the TBot, we demonstrated it to a focus group of BPS participants online. The evaluation identified a number of useful guidelines for museums as they use our system to create their own smart descriptive guide for BPS visitors.