Accessibility in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Galleries / Museums

As discussed in the introduction to this LibGuide, there is a difference between accessibility and accommodation. Accessibility is grounded in foresight, for inclusion to be part of the blueprint and ethos from the beginning of an initiative whether it is a new exhibition, a social media post, or building plan, whereas accommodation is about applying changes to an already existing exhibition, website, building, etc due to a request or need. While both are essential now, the hope is to enact accessibility to the point that it is the norm and accommodation is no longer applicable or needed. Source material for these accommodation recommendations is linked inside the text and/or included in the sources box at the bottom of this page.

The Physical Space

• Accessible Exhibition Design Guides
  • Smithsonian Standards and Guidelines for Accessibility and Accessible Exhibition Design and A Planning Guide for Making Temporary Events Accessible to People With Disabilities are guides that provide a framework for creating accessible exhibitions. 
• Building Infrastructure
  • Plentiful Seating Options 
    • Smithsonian Public Seating Accessibility Guidelines outlines the accessibility parameters of various seating options, both indoors and outside, with the mandate that seating must be provided in each exhibition, because "there aren’t enough benches in museums" is most often the norm. 
  • Ramps [Not Stairs]
    • ADA ramps require a slope ratio of 1:12, and temporary ramps can be installed if a permanent alteration is not feasible.
  • Wide and Easy Entrances
    • ADA guidelines recommend a door width with a 36 inch clearance.
    • Doors should have automated opening options.
  • All-Gender Bathrooms
    • Have gender expansive bathrooms, instead of "female" or "male" ones, with baby changing rooms in all bathrooms. 
    • Offer free bathroom access to the public regardless of ticket purchase. 
• Large Labels
  • Shape Art's An Accessible Marketing Guide provides helpful pointers when creating exhibition marketing content, like using large print that is 18 point and avoiding fancy fonts, large blocks of capitals and italics (using bold instead). 
  • Consider using a hyperlegible font, like Braille Institute's free Atkison Hyperlegible font for your printed and digital materials. 
• Audio Description Recordings and Devices
  • The Audio Description Project and Audio Description as a Pedagogical Tool speak at length about audio description, with guidelines, samples, and instructional examples.
  • There are a variety of audio description devices for cultural institutions, like those made by Durateq or Sennheiser, or consider having audio recordings accessible online or via QR codes. Offer full-text transcripts of all audio recordings.
  • Include captions for video content. Activating Captions is an example of critically engaging with captioning as an artistic form.
  • Park McArthur's PARA-SITES project at MoMA is an example of an audio description built into the core of an art experience. 
• Multilingual Access
  • Language Justice as envisioned by Antena outlines a potential multilingual future on our collective horizon. What are the official languages of your location? What are the most commonly spoken tongues in your community? What is the indigenous language of the land? Have your content and exhibitions support as many of these languages as possible. 
  • Hire Sign Language interpreters for tours, openings, and other events. 
• Touch Access 
  • Art Beyond Sight's Touch Tours and Other Tactile Experiences offers guidelines and inspiration for incorporating tactile tours into your institution's programming. 
  • Create wall labels, guides, and brochures in Braille if possible. Braille is a code of six dots in two columns of three dots that can be read by the fingers, and you can buy kits (like this one) and produce Braille in-house or work with an agency that produces content in text to Braille translation. 
• Staff and Docent Training
  • Art Beyond Sight's Staff and Docent Training stresses the importance of staff training with sample agendas, checklists, and a complete Docent Training course. Interactions with front-of-house staff and guards can make or break a museum experience for disabled patrons, so training staff on disability awareness and accessibility accommodations is essential.
• Additional Initiatives
  • Adopt sliding scale ticketing and allow Personal Care Assistants to enter for free. Make sure it is easy and acceptable to get a full-refund on a ticket or to reschedule a visit it if a patron is feeling unwell. 
  • Create a transportation fund for school tours (like the Kauffman Center does for example) and for individuals in your community. Here is a list of funding resources to support transportation initiatives.  

The Virtual Space

• An Accessible Website
  • Explore ADA Website Accessibility Toolkit, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: Easy Checks, and How to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements to understand the accessibility compliance of your website and what you might need to improve.
  • Make sure that information about the accessibility accommodations your physical arts space offers, such as tours and multi-sensory access, are easily found on your website. 
• Alt-Text for Images
  • Alt-Text as Poetry by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan is a thoughtful dive into alt-text with a workbook that includes a series of writing exercises.
  • Coyote is a free, open source software developed by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to support a distributed workflow for describing images and publishing those descriptions to a public website. They also published helpful guidelines for alt-text. 
• Live Transcription
  • Automatic captions should be available for virtual events. Zoom has a live transcription feature and so does Google Hangouts.

Additional Resources

• Carolyn Lazard's Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice is an especially helpful guide for small to mid-sized arts spaces.
• Consider practicing Indigenous Land Acknowledgements in physical and virtual space. Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgement and Are you planning to do a Land Acknowledgement? offer helpful framing. 
• Check out The Museums Episode from the Disability Visibility Project for a lens into disability initiatives in art spaces and beyond.

These accessibility-focused organizations work with art institutions to expand their programming to diversely abled audiences. Many have a wide variety of online resources freely available and other offer hands-on training on an institutional level.

• Shape Arts is a disability-led arts organization which works to improve access to culture for disabled people by providing opportunities for disabled artists, training cultural institutions, and through running participatory arts programs. They have a treasure trove of online resources covering everything from An Accessible Arts Marketing Guide to Creating Participatory Projects with Disabled People. 
• Art Beyond Sight is dedicated to empowering and enriching the lives of children and adults through access to art and culture. They published an online handbook that takes arts professionals through the process of creating accessible programming for people with a wide variety of visual impairments.
• The Accessible Icon Project is an ongoing work of design activism that started with a graphic icon, free for use in the public domain. The Accessible Icon Project’s free to use symbol is now legally accepted in several US States and has been adopted within cultural institutions including The Museum of Modern Art (Renel 2019).
• Attitude is Everything is a disability-led charity with 20 years of experience supporting non-profit and commercial organizations to make what they do more accessible and inclusive for Deaf and disabled people. Their resources page includes the Access Guide to Online Music Events and Ticketing Without Barriers Coalition.
• iMuse aims to enable everyone to increase their enjoyment of and interaction with museums, galleries and other cultural spaces through the use of mobile devices to access virtual space and interact with the real space. Since 2015, iMuse has been overseen by RG spaces and their focus is now on creating small web app games for museums and heritage sites as a low cost way of engaging visitors using IT.

The following case studies are a small sampling of accessibility initiatives that are taking place in arts spaces.

Beyond the Visual at The Mattress Factory

The Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museums in Pittsburgh which features site-specific installations created by artists-in-residence. The museum is considered an industry leader in developed multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory education that focuses on creative problem solving and critical thinking from a contemporary arts lens (Henrich et al., 2014). Takeaways from their initiatives include:

• Conducting focus groups with disabled communities is much more effective than simply theorizing what their experience is like.
• Their focus groups with blind and low vision patrons brought up the importance of describing a work of art without a philosophical or conceptual critique. This group also responded most favorably to pieces with a sound and touch element as well as installations with a strong narrative component. 
• Make sure that the language and content for the accessibility portion of your website is prominently featured. Many disabled patrons check the websites of cultural spaces to decide if the space is amenable to their needs. If they cannot find this information, they will likely hesitate to visit in person. 

Relaxed Performance Project

The relaxed performance movement in the United Kingdom was formalized with the creation of the Relaxed Performance Project, led by disabled writer, performer and activist Jess Thom, and has now spread to theaters and performance venues internationally. Thom describes relaxed performances as those which "offer a warm welcome to people who might find it difficult to follow the usual conventions of theatre etiquette. This can include people with learning disabilities and autistic spectrum disorders or other neurological conditions such as Tourettes Syndrome, people who experience social anxiety, and people with young children or babies" (Renel, 2019). 

Approaches to relaxed performance include the following strategies as outlined in "Sonic Accessibility: Increasing Social Equity Through the Inclusive Design of Sound in Museums and Heritage Sites" by William Renel and these ideas can be incorporated into all types of arts events and spaces:

• Welcoming movement and noise from the audience, giving everyone permission to be themselves and respond naturally to the space.
• Pre-show information describing how to get to a venue, what to expect from the performance and building and what accessibility provisions are and aren’t available.
• An open invitation for audience members to come in and out of the space whenever they like.
• Considerations of lighting and sound levels and/or the provision of equipment such as ear defenders through which people can manage the sensory environment.
• Ensuring staff have a clear understanding of how any complaints will be managed during the performance.
• A designated quiet or chill out space that is clearly signposted, available to audience members throughout their visit.

Accessibility in arts spaces is not just about buildings, tours, or websites: it is vital to consider accessibility from the lens of artist representation. Including disabled artists in exhibitions and collections is paramount. There are too many incredible artists to fit on a page so this is only a tiny sampling of work created by disabled artists active today. Please note that we are using "disabled artists" as a catch-all term that does not negate or replace personal word choices that these artists and all disabled people use as markers of identity. 

Christine Sun Kim / http://christinesunkim.com/

 

 

 

 

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Carolyn Lazard / http://www.carolynlazard.com/

 

 

 

 

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Shannon Finnegan / https://shannonfinnegan.com/

 

 

 

 

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Jeff Kasper / https://jeffkasper.co/ 

 

 

 

 

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