Document Type: Blog Post
Description: Blog post on Museums & the Web 2016 conference, focusing on sessions and panels on Accessibility and online design
Document Type: Blog Post
Description: Blog post on Museums & the Web 2016 conference, focusing on sessions and panels on Accessibility and online design
Citation: Anable, Susan (2001). Accessibility Techniques for Museum Websites. Museums & the Web.
Document Type: Conference Paper
Description: This case study of the Virtual Museum Tour, part of the website of The Dayton Art Institute and developed in collaboration with Wright State University, details the challenge of making a variety of internet technologies accessible to people with visual or hearing impairment or mobility limitations, and the use of web accessibility guidelines to develop an online solution
Document Type: Conference Paper
Description: This case study of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights details the museum’s early mandate for inclusive design to be implemented throughout the museum experience, and the resulting variety of designs and intentions that ultimately required development and implementation strategies
Document Type: Conference Paper
Description: This paper presents the results of an audit of the accessibility of 125 museum web sites: 100 from England and 25 from around the world
Document Type: Conference Paper
Description: This paper aims to advance general awareness of inclusive design, convey a working knowledge of digital accessibility issues, and proffer actionable advice and tools to museum professionals who wish to join the ever growing community who are incorporating accessibility and universal design into their everyday practice
Please sign in and add your resources below:
Notes and questions from the Accessibility session at the Museums and the Web Conference 2017.
In keeping with the MCA’s commitment to access, inclusion, and equity, the museum’s Board, staff, and volunteers endeavor to extend an authentic welcome to our building, exhibitions, programs, and information at all times and to all visitors. This includes visitors with disabilities, that is: people with mobility problems, vision impairment, hearing impairment, and cognitive disabilities, whether temporary or permanent.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, a civil rights law passed in 1990, guided the museum’s accessibility work for many years. Until recently, the museum focused on two key aspects of the ADA guidelines: providing accommodations to employees and job applicants with disabilities, and ensuring that people with disabilities could access and navigate our physical facilities. In 2015, in response to a city-wide celebration of the 25th anniversary of the ADA, a group of museum staff began to think about how we might go beyond the mere letter of the law to do more for our most underserved visitors. That group, now the museum’s Accessibility Leadership Task Force, is a pan-institutional team with an interest in thinking creatively about how to encourage long-term engagement with disabled visitors.
To do so, we are studying our already-excellent accessible offerings and working to improve and expand them, to share information about them more broadly; and to make them more consistent, useful, and innovative. These programs include stage and gallery programs that feature ASL interpretation and open captioning; touch tours; staff trained to support visitors of all abilities; a website with best-in-class accessible features; and more. Our work has shown us that common assumptions about accessible programs and facilities—that they are expensive, and useful only for a limited audience—are not usually true. We believe that by crafting programs and spaces that serve the needs of the disability community, we are improving our offerings and our invitation to all visitors.
We still have a lot to learn from our visitors with disabilities and from others who are thinking about accessible practices, but we aspire to be leaders in the community in embracing tenets of universal design. Keeping accessibility and universal design principles in mind as we plan, decide, create, teach, fund, hire, train, communicate, and execute our programs and exhibitions will guide our staff, who—regardless of department or role—share the responsibility and privilege of making the MCA accessible to all.
The accessibility team is a pan-institutional group meeting once monthly. Members include staff from Collections and Exhibitions, Design, Publishing, and New Media, Education, Facilities, HR, Performance, and Visitor Services. In 2015, the group developed a 3-year accessibility plan in response to a challenge by the Chicago Community Trust’s ADA 25 celebration of the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The MCA plan outlines the group’s commitment to providing a welcoming, accessible, and authentic experience for all museum visitors, both onsite and online, regardless of their ability or need. The group’s activities are reported to the Access, Inclusion, and Equity Task Force by Pat Fraser and Yolanda Cesta Cursach.
Many of the task force’s goals for Year 1 of its 3-year plan have been met or are underway. A summary of achievements and activities to date follows: