Warren Logan’s hands skim the 15-century marble bust, tracing the lifeless eyes, the slightly agape mouth, the precisely chiselled fur.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s (Kansas City, U.S.A.) new touch tour is among programmes at more than 100 museums in the country that attempt to do what once was thought impossible - making art accessible and even visible to visually impaired people.

The Nelson-Atkins programme has participants first feel pieces of slate and marble - the materials of which the works they’ll feel are made. Later, specially trained docents guide the hands of visually impaired people across 500-year-old Spanish tomb covers, an Italian bust of St. John the Baptist and numerous pieces by celebrated modernist sculptor Henry Moore, asking them questions about their perceptions and offering them history behind the piece.

Art museums first began to make their collections accessible to visually impaired people in the early 1970s. The ‘Form in Art’ initiative at the Philadelphia museum of art was among the first to reach out to the blind people. The three-year programme combines the study of art history, tactile examinations of objects in the museum’s collections and participants’ own creation of artwork.

In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts’ long time tour for the blind people sometimes makes use of poetry or music. At the Umlauf Sculpture Garden in Austin, Texas, visually impaired visitors can listen to an audio guide that instructs them where to reach, what to feel and the history behind the piece. And at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where touch tours have been available since 1972, blind people can lay their hands on masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Auguste Rodin.

Francesca Rosenberg, head,Museum of Modern Art’s accessibility programmes, explained ‘‘Really, what these individuals are doing is what many people want to do when they visit the museum, which many people do when the guards aren’t looking (touch and feel the piece).’’