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Museum Accessibility Resources

CMME is collecting existing resources on museum accessibility, as well as researching new tools and approaches. Here are some of our favorites:

Cultural Access New England (CANE) was founded to advance access to cultural facilities in New England for people with disabilities of all types. CANE defines accessibility broadly, to include programmatic, architectural, physical, communication, attitudinal and other forms of access. CANE takes as a basic tenet that increasing accessibility for people with disabilities increases accessibility for everyone. Find CANE on Facebook, too.

Museum Access Consortium (MAC) consists of representatives from various museum departments throughout the New York City Metropolitan area and members and representatives of the disability community. Members of MAC exchange information, ideas and resources and provide a network of mutual support.

 Smithsonian’s Access American Stories is a bilingual (Spanish/English) “crowdsourced” audio experience and companion to the American Stories exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Designed to increase accessibility for visitors with low vision, the app offers everyone new ways of seeing 100 of America’s most evocative historical objects through the eyes of both visitors and museum staff. Visitors can participate by describing one of the objects on display or your experience of the exhibition.

The Multimodal Approaches to Learning International Conference took place on October 26-28, 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The conference addressed inclusive and multisensory learning environments and strategies, particularly in relation to the arts and museums.

Kiosk Information Systems offers ADA guidelines for kiosk designers.

WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, a CMME partner, has created Media Access Mobile, a mobile system to enhance the experience for visitors to cultural institutions who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, visually impaired, or who speak languages other than English. Media Access Mobile provides synchronized text (captions, subtitles or audio descriptions) in any combination of languages, all provided simultaneously, over a WiFi network and displayed on iPod Touches which are provided to visitors on-site. See it in action in this short video.