A Pilot Study on Curator-Guided Multilingual Art Description for Blind and Low-Vision Audiences with Small Vision-Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31080v1
• Date: Fri, 29 May 2026 09:47:45 GMT
• Title: A Pilot Study on Curator-Guided Multilingual Art Description for Blind and Low-Vision Audiences with Small Vision-Language Models
• Abstract summary: Blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences remain underserved by visual art descriptions.<n>Pilot study investigates curator-guided multilingual art description with Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct for German, Romanian, and Serbian.
• Score: 50.00033296815133
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences remain underserved by visual art descriptions, particularly across languages and in museum settings where privacy and intellectual-property constraints may favour small on-premise vision-language models (VLMs). This pilot study investigates curator-guided multilingual art description with Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct for German, Romanian, and Serbian. We construct a parallel BLV-oriented caption corpus from artwork images and metadata, and compare language-specific LoRA adapters with a single multilingual adapter under a fixed backbone and training budget. Evaluation combines automatic lexical and embedding-based metrics with an LLM-as-Judge protocol calibrated against a small Romanian BLV pilot study. Under our pilot setup, language-specific adapters show more stable controllability and visually grounded description quality for Romanian and Serbian, while multilingual adaptation remains competitive in German. We frame these findings as deployment-oriented evidence for small on-premise VLMs, and highlight the need for larger BLV user studies and broader language coverage before drawing general conclusions about multilingual accessibility.

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