Antonio Guimaraes
Museum Reader gives more freedom to blind visitors by making audio descriptions more readily available. It allows museums to create verbal descriptions, and enables visitors to play them back by scanning a tag and listening to prerecorded audio.
Description
The museum experience for blind visitors is often limited to personalized, scheduled tours, or monthly events. These prepared tours may include verbal descriptions, touch tours, conversations, or a combination thereof. Much effort and many tools have been employed at museums to bring accessibility to the blind, but despite these efforts, blind visitors are missing out on a fuller experience that allows them to enjoy any part of a museum collection of their choosing.
Museum Reader is a device that enables a blind patron to scan a tag placed at the artifact site, then hear an audio description associated with that artifact. When implemented, the Museum Reader enables museums to make prerecorded audio descriptions they make available to patrons via the device, thus eliminating the need to train staff and docents for each visit by a blind person. Instead, these museum educators can focus on creating audio descriptions for a wide number of artifacts in a museum, and interact with patrons as they explore a wider range of items.
From a blind visitor's perspective, a museum visit would not need to be prescheduled, or limited to what pieces can be touched. They could pair up with a sighted guide who can assist in locating the artifacts, and their correspoinding tags, and listen to prerecorded messages and descriptions.
Classes
Presentation Video
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