Museum experience of blind visitor

Related documents

This document is a result from a design walk through with a blind user

Protocol of description during museum visit

1) Tell us about your museum experiences

• not gone recently
• gone to two museums before in other countries
• reasonably good experience
  • group of 20 people
  • art museum
  • historical sites with exhibits
  • people in the group were interested in talking about the exhibits and were good communicators
  • group members gave descriptions of artifacts "blue background, tree with green..."
  • More important is what the artifact does to the mind - the experience of visiting a museum
  • Needs an experiential component (tone in a persons voice, not only a screen reader giving the facts)
    • instead of simple descriptions, details that are meaningful and exciting (e.g. sun light, colours, shadows, people and interactions, interesting facts, history) enhance the experience of the object
    • interaction with other museum visitors
    • context of artifact is very important and not only the plain experience
    • tone, presentation, background, meaning, atmosphere (lighting), spatial arrangement (how object relates to other objects)
    • convey the experience that the museum intended to carry over to the visitor and translate into words - what is the meaning meant to be conveyed by the artifact
    • also important for a webpage
    • hard to capture art in a picture and carry the meaning without a narrative and explanation

2) Do you ever look at museum websites

• no, but willing to look at websites and give recommendations
• they're uninteresting and probably not experiential
• Looking at a wikipedia or good encyclopedia article might actually give more meaningful information about a piece of art than a museum website would*

3) Did you in a museum ever take advantage of audio guides or other tech

• No, visit was always in a group with a guide that could provide far more context and background
• Living tour guides are a key part of a good visitor experience. There should be a framwork for assessing existing systems and human guides and extract information carried to be able to have. Important to evaluate audio guides that are currently available and compare it with a tour given by a living person. This would help determine the kinds of information that CMS' & audio guides, etc. need to carry for good visitor experience.
• relation of items in physical space
• why is curator placing items and how
• what is the atmosphere and story of the exhibition in a room