New approaches to accessibility and audio description in museum environments

This chapter will concentrate on the question of accessibility to museums, to architecture and to famous landmarks, for potentially new blind and sight-impaired audiences. It will dwell on advances in the field of audio description (AD) tout court but also on accompanying accessibility features exploiting the sense of touch, smell and sound. The concept of presence or engagement, discussed for example by Fryer with reference to film AD, will be introduced also to this aspect of audio description. The modern museum differs greatly from the institutions of the not so distant past, and AD has to be shaped to accommodate the hands-on approach and the hybrid nature of many such establishments. Here advances in digital technology come into play, particularly regarding end-user devices. The kind of research currently being conducted on AD in museum environments within the ADLAB PRO European project, goes hand in hand with museum research and visitor studies. At the University of Trieste, research has focussed on providing accessibility (both to artefacts and in terms of mobility within and outside the building) to such institutions as the National Archeological Museum in Aquileia and the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art in Venice. Studies of architectural landmarks include the Basilica of Aquileia and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. An important part of the above-mentioned project, designed primarily to create the profile of the professional audio describer in various contexts and provide a training curriculum to achieve that objective, is devoted to the AD of museums, etc. In this way, the research and analyses conducted have been funneled into creating a course structure for prospective museum describers, which will be described in this account.