Exhibit Design Relating to Low Vision and Blindness: Current Media Technology, Appropriate Application of Technology, Future Research Needs
Overview of Current Media Technologies
Our nation’s museums, science centers, art galleries, historic sites, and national parks are places where visitors with disabilities should be fully welcome and accommodated. Live and media-based offerings have played a central role in recasting these institutions into today's vibrant, family-oriented community resources. They employ multimedia, social media, live events, and conventional and large-format films to build on exhibits and make an era, a topic, or an experience come alive for visitors, providing educational, community and recreational resources for both students and lifelong learners.1
New technologies offer these institutions myriad new ways to allow visitors to explore artifacts, collections, concepts, and sites2 . Museums and galleries as well as historic and nature sites use multimedia and new immersive technologies to engage and retain current audiences and attract new audiences on-site and online. They offer digital resources for the public to experience before, during and after in-person visits, and many institutions are realizing that their multimedia exhibits and streamed or downloadable events reach audiences who may never visit their physical building. Students, home-schooled and otherwise, use online resources in classwork and homework, and other “virtual” visitors who may be unable to travel due to economics or illness or disability, or who may be geographically distant, regularly use technologybased resources to pursue personal interests or scholarship.
New technologies also offer cultural institutions the ability to make their content and facilities accessible and welcoming to people with disabilities3 . A number of institutions have pioneered or prototyped accessibility implementations with captioned exhibits and tactile explorations and/or audio descriptions for select exhibits, such as the Tate Modern in London4, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art5, the New York Hall of Science6 , the New England Aquarium7 , the Museum of Modern Art8, some exhibits and museums within the Smithsonian9 in Washington, and various national parks sites around the country. More and more interest groups are discussing accessibility challenges on listservs10 moderated by museum organizations. The Museum Accessibility Consortium11 in New York provides a forum for addressing museum accessibility issues, and Art Beyond Sight12 regularly convenes seminars on sensory access for museum professionals. A major resource in the field is the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD)13, which convenes an annual conference and maintains an active online discussion. Most members of cultural institutions that participate in these conferences, fora and groups are from audience-services departments that are eager to learn more about how to meet the needs of disabled visitors. They are well-versed in accommodations such as provision of sign-language interpreters, Braille signage and handouts, individual or group tours and service-animal policies. The next frontier for these dedicated staffers is determining the best new technologies to be used to deliver, in an accessible manner, alternate format services to enhance the on-site and online experiences for blind and visually impaired visitors.
Staffs of cultural institutions are increasingly interested in what is available today for captioning and audio description systems, via handheld tours as well as description and caption display options for their live performances and IMAX movies (i.e., for description, wireless audio via IR and FM; for captions, projected open captions, seatback or open caption LED or Rear Window Captioning systems). However, beyond basic Web-site accessibility and limited captioning of video and audio, few museums have the resources or expertise to explore how universal design can be integrated into their overall technology strategy for exhibit design and collections access. Most are overwhelmed by the degree of technical expertise required to advocate for and select accessible technology implementations as well as the attendant costs. In fact, many are struggling to maintain or upgrade existing systems and solutions and are actively seeking less-expensive methods of offering accessible tours using visitors’ own personal devices.
Recently, the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Museum Project14 conducted a collaborative two-year process to identify the emerging technologies most likely to impact cultural institutions in the next five years. The research confirmed the impact of the following technological solutions all of which, if appropriately implemented, have tremendous potential to better meet the needs of visitors with disabilities and include: 1) mobile devices; 2) systems for collection, digital asset, and content management; 3) geolocation capabilities; 4) alternative-interaction devices; 5) open content and open educational resources and 6) multi-language capabilities.
A widely circulated response to the previously mentioned Horizon Museum Report notes that museums have scarce resources to respond to opportunities offered by new technologies or to keep up with visitors’ expectations of technology-enabled services (Honeysett, 2009). Technology expertise is not yet a core competency for staff at most cultural institutions, although there is growing agreement that technology is becoming a key strategic factor across multiple program areas. Most institutions rely on the expertise of external design firms and technical consultants to develop cutting-edge exhibits that incorporate new media and learning technologies, interface design, and user interactions and these consultants rarely have much of a base of accessible technology expertise or experience.
By involving leading technology and design firms in the drive to design more inclusive cultural institutions, accessibility and universal design issues can be more widely understood and implemented from the initial development phase. Accessibility advocates within the field can produce approaches and tools that address the challenges of integration and sustained implementation of accessibility solutions into today’s technology solutions. In particular, the increasingly creative use of handheld devices as a vehicle for interpretation of exhibits holds great promise for accessibility. Currently, accessible tours are the primary means through which people with disabilities enjoy and understand content offered by cultural institutions. These tours can be enabled by human guides or handheld devices and are sometimes as low-tech as simple paper scripts or Braille guides. The use of handhelds and personal devices is growing fast. In the near future, mobile interpretations offered by cultural institutions are projected to be more Web-like, with applications available for handhelds that offer customized and contextualized information, with search functions that tap directly into the museum’s or companion sites' collections, incorporating user-generated content and social-networking options.
However, existing accessibility solutions for handheld devices are expensive and not flexible enough to keep pace with new forms of content, and emerging solutions and innovative approaches are not widely known and are mostly still in development.15 There is presently an extremely limited set of systems and technologies available, and too many accessibility solutions used in cultural institutions are based on proprietary applications or only work with particular operating systems or device platforms. None of the existing systems offer portable, extensible and sharable content across institutions. Some solutions focus on only one segment of audience needs (i.e., only captioning or signing for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, or only audio description for people who are blind or visually impaired). Use of off-the-shelf hardware and software and industry-standard file formats will help resolve many of these barriers. Recommendations and solutions recognize that all technologies are moving targets and are in a period of rapid growth and change and that access elements (captions, description, sign language interpretation) added by museums must be able to survive generation after generation of software and hardware upgrades. Further, all access elements should be included in collection-management systems to accompany those objects in future uses, whether in exhibits, handheld tours or online.
1 "Getting an Earful at the Museum," Wall St. Journal, N. Matsumoto, August 26, 2009
2 "Museum Technologies and Trends on the Horizon - A Critical Review," N. Honeysett, AAM Philadelphia, April 30th 2009
3 Constantine, 2007
4 http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/information/access.htm
6 http://www.nysci.org/visit/1428642
7 http://www.neaq.org/visit_planning/accessibility/index.php
8 http://www.moma.org/visit/plan/accessibility
9 http://www.si.edu/visit/visitors_with_disabilities.htm
10 culturalartsaccess@yahoogroups.com
11 http://cityaccessny.org/mac.php
12 http://www.artbeyondsight.org/
13 http://www.kennedy-center.org/accessibility/education/lead/conference.html
15 NCAM research for U.S. Department of Education proposal (not published)
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