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This article first appeared in the journal Exhibition (Fall 2025) Vol. 44 No. 2 and is reproduced with permission.

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Taking up space as a disabled person is always revolutionary. —Sandy Ho[i]

The Museum of the American Revolution (the Museum) in Old City, Philadelphia, encourages visitors to think about the Revolution not just as a war or specific historical era, but as a set of ideas and aspirations that can continue to guide our actions in a contemporary world. In our efforts to make the story of the American Revolution—and the responsibilities of its legacy—feel like it belongs to every visitor, inclusivity and accessibility have become part of our core interpretive values.[ii]

In this paper, we will focus on three projects designed specifically for blind and low-vision (BLV) visitors in partnership with local disability advocacy groups: touch tours, audio descriptive tours, and tactile graphics. By sharing our experiences with these projects, and how they’ve deepened our understanding of disability, we hope to provide an example of the potential ways museums and cultural institutions can make all visitors feel welcome, prioritized, and autonomous, while recognizing there are always opportunities for us to continue learning and improving.

First Steps Toward Accessibility

Upon opening in April 2017, the Museum had the advantage of a new building that could facilitate various forms of multimedia displays and immersive environments. During the Museum’s development, Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, then in charge of Collections, Exhibits, and Programs and currently the President and CEO, expressed his intention to make the museum experience like “a movie you could walk through.” Partly inspired by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, England,^[iii] Stephenson and early staff prioritized multisensory design elements to engage visitors of all ages and interest levels in the American Revolution. As visitors explore the core galleries, they move over textured floors that evoke the streets of Revolutionary-era Boston, muddy and trampled with horseshoe prints; stand below a life-size replica of a Liberty Tree with a touchable fragment of wood from the real Annapolis Liberty Tree embedded in it (intro image); join the Battle of Brandywine in an immersive theater; and smell a piece of rope from a privateer ship. The interactive galleries have been widely appreciated by a diverse and often overlapping group of audiences, including school groups, families, and some visitors with autism spectrum disorder, particularly those who enjoy more dynamic sensory experiences.[iv]

However, simply having touchable, interactive objects was not enough to fulfill the needs of visitors with disabilities. To be truly accessible, we would need to develop programs that were created specifically for disabled people, using feedback from advocacy groups and the community. Over the past several years, Museum staff across multiple departments have worked with disability advocacy groups, including the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, Hands UP Productions, The Seeing Eye, and Salus University, to learn where our exhibits could be improved and what resources people with disabilities would find most useful. The knowledge we’ve gained through these partnerships has led us to implement programs and services such as “discovery carts” that allow visitors to handle reproduction objects, American Sign Language (ASL) tours, an ASL scavenger hunt and Community Day for families with Deaf members, quarterly sensory-friendly mornings for families with neurodiverse members, and free attendance for Personal Care Attendants.

One of our first steps was to begin internally, providing cultural sensitivity training to all frontline staff during their onboarding process. Led by Art-Reach, a Philadelphia nonprofit that expands accessible opportunities in the arts, this training continues to be mandatory for all visitor-facing staff and covers the medical and social models of disability, types of barriers that exist for people with disabilities, and appropriate language to use when speaking to and about people with disabilities. The goal of this training is to help prepare staff, some of whom have little experience interacting with people with disabilities, for respectful and comfortable interactions with all guests. Staff from the Visitor Engagement, Security, Custodial, and Education departments also complete autism and neurodiversity training through the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES) to maintain the Museum’s status as a Certified Autism Center.

Touch Tours

Our work in designing intentionally accessible programs specifically for the BLV community began with a suggestion from historian, and longtime friend of the Museum, Frederick Noesner (d. 2018). Blind since childhood, Noesner had a lifelong interest in colonial history and was a skilled craftsman of antique weapons, clocks, and tools. Noesner’s suggestion to create tactile experiences for blind visitors led to the idea of a 90-minute touch tour that would engage guests in the diverse stories of the American Revolution through an educator-facilitated experience of the main galleries using audio description and handling objects.

The tour debuted in 2018 with the support of Philly Touch Tours (PTT), a local organization that specializes in verbal description and touch tour consultation for cultural institutions. Before its launch, the touch tour was audited by Art-Reach and PTT’s Vision Council, a paid group of members from the BLV community who evaluate programming and resources at cultural institutions across the Greater Philadelphia region. PTT also facilitated a training on the delivery of this program for frontline staff, having them complete post-tour reflection forms to both consider their individual growth and identify where the Museum could improve. Follow-up communication (verbal and email) with PTT and Art-Reach also revealed that early morning touch tours are more difficult for BLV guests due to potential transportation delays; that it’s usually acceptable to use sight-based verbs like “look” while providing an audio description; and that smaller groups work better for guests and educators.

While we had originally planned to offer touch tours on a bimonthly basis, low registration numbers prompted us to shift to offering them on-demand. We have also been able to address some of the suggestions given to us by our frontline educators, including creating more handling objects for galleries that have fewer interactive elements and developing raised-line tactile images. We will go into further detail about these projects later in the paper.

Audio Descriptive Tours

Even as we added touch tours to the Museum’s list of accommodation offerings, we understood that our work was not complete. The preferences and needs of any disability group are neither static nor universal, so we have always remained open to the suggestions of Museum visitors, partner organizations, and speakers at workshops and conferences. At the suggestion of Art-Reach and frontline staff who received touch tour training, we began considering the implementation of audio description for our two main films: a brief orientation to the American Revolution and an exploration of the history and legacy of George Washington’s sleeping and office tent, which the Museum displays as part of our permanent collection.[v]^, [vi] Our contacts at Art-Reach recommended we work with Nicole Sardella, a Philadelphia-based audio describer who has partnered with multiple visual arts institutions in the city.

Sardella and the Museum’s education team began planning the film descriptions in early 2020, but the project was placed on hold when the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated switching our focus from on-site experiences to virtual ones. As institutions reopened to the public in 2021, we reached out to Sardella again with a proposal to expand the original project’s scope to include audio description of the Museum’s core galleries. Around this time, the Museum was fortunate to receive a very generous two-year grant from the Gordon and Llura Gund 1993 Foundation,^[vii] which allowed us to invite PTT and the Vision Council to participate in the project and provide crucial feedback throughout the development process.

One of the most anticipated outcomes of the audio descriptive tour was the opportunity to pair it with a tactile map of our core galleries, a project that had been in development since 2021 as an independent resource but was realigned to complement the audio descriptive tour. The tactile map was designed and printed by the Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired (Clovernook) in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has gone through several iterations as we’ve received feedback from BLV guests.

In the map’s original form (11 x 11 inches), each gallery was labeled with a braille number that corresponded to a booklet, the same size as the map, of braille-printed gallery descriptions. One of the biggest challenges when developing the map was imagining how a BLV visitor would use it while navigating the galleries, especially if they had to keep one hand free to hold a cane or a seeing-eye dog. PTT and the Vision Council suggested attaching the map to a lanyard, so it could be worn around the neck, keeping it as hands-free as possible. Even with this approach, the multipage booklet was unwieldy and difficult to use. When the audio descriptive tour was confirmed, we realized there was an opportunity to connect the two resources by matching the numbers on the map to the stops on the tour. In April 2025, the Museum launched the combined audio descriptive tour and tactile map, eliminating the need for the braille booklet. Visitors can now access the tour on their personal devices (or one provided by the Museum) using a braille QR code printed on the map.

One of the major goals of the audio descriptive tour was to mitigate some of the social barriers that limit the autonomy of people with disabilities. Like many museums, we require visitors to request accommodation for services two weeks in advance of their visit so we have time to make the necessary preparations. But this requirement makes it harder for someone with a disability to make the spontaneous decision to visit a museum without a companion who can support them. A post on the Parsons School of Design’s student blog argues that everyone has “the right to spontaneity,” a natural human behavior essential to sustaining community.[viii] The extensive planning that disabled people must often do before an activity is not only frustrating and tiring, but a reminder of society’s failure to provide adequate resources and services. It is hoped that the implementation of readily available resources like the audio descriptive tour, which do not need a facilitator or two-weeks’ advanced notice, will help BLV visitors experience our museum more independently and to its fullest extent. Our mandatory accessibility and touch tour trainings also help our frontline staff feel comfortable leading an on-demand tour for a “walk-in” visitor.

Tactile Experiences in Exhibit Spaces  

Curatorial and education staff discussed each painting and what details from each should be highlighted in the tactile graphics. For example, with The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770, staff prioritized focusing on details such as the watchman with the broadsword, a Continental soldier wearing an overcoat, a British soldier, a man with a club, and the thick fog, gunfire, and weapons scattered throughout the scene (fig. 3). The final product draws attention to most of these details, and, when paired with audio description, enhances BLV visitors’ experience of both the visual content and the emotions the scene evokes (fig. 4).

Clovernook conducted their own user testing and made some adjustments to the graphics based on feedback from BLV users. For example, in The March to Valley Forge, visitors expressed a preference that snow be represented by a typical snowflake shape rather than raised dashes, and that the original positioning of Washington’s horse’s head led them to believe it was floating, not affixed to a body. Clovernook was able to make these corrections in the final tactile graphic (fig. 5).

These graphics inspired the eventual creation of two other tactile images of the Museum’s most iconic object: George Washington’s sleeping and office tent (fig. 6). The goal for these was to have a physical representation of the tent’s construction and shape. Using graphics of the tent provided by the Museum, Clovernook produced a raised image to illustrate the construction and parts of the tent. This led to the creation of 3D-printed scale models of Washington’s sleeping and office tent, dining tent, and a common soldier’s tent for our special exhibit, Witness to Revolution: The Unlikely Travels of Washington’s Tent (February 2024–January 2025) (fig. 7). The goal of the 3D-printed tents was to provide an interactive and unfacilitated way for visitors to better understand the differences in size, shape, and appearance among the different types of tents (fig. 8). The .STL file (for 3D printing) for the sleeping and office tent can be downloaded for free on our website.[ix]

When asked about the tactile pieces’ installation in the exhibition, Samuel Foulkes, Director of Braille Production and Accessible Innovation at Clovernook, said: 

Historically, people who are blind or have low vision have been excluded from cultural spaces. Today, museums usually only have a small portion of their exhibits accessible, and often these accessibility features are only [available] on request or during particular programs. Through the installation of these tactile pieces directly in the space, the Museum is allowing more people to explore the tent structures in a tactile way, independently, and not on special request. With these models, people who are blind or low-vision can be full participants in the exhibit and gain access to something that was previously only a visual experience.[x]

By including these elements in our galleries and exhibitions, the Museum aims to create autonomy for guests who are BLV, and to be a space where the story of the American Revolution becomes more real for all visitors.

Planning for the Future

As the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, the Museum has a special opportunity to continue facilitating conversations about our nation’s relationship with its Revolutionary past and the ongoing legacy of the Declaration. Our special exhibition, The Declaration’s Journey, set to open in October 2025, will explore the history and global impact of the Declaration of Independence, from 1776 to today, through a rich selection of objects, diverse stories, and accessible exhibit design.

Using the lessons we’ve learned from our past experiences, we are working to provide audio descriptions and ASL interpretations of the exhibition’s films, as well as braille copies of some of the documents that will be on display, including one of John Dunlap’s printings of the Declaration of Independence, France’s “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and excerpts from Fredrick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The exhibition will also include a 3D-printed reproduction of a composing stick, a tool used in typesetting, that will help all visitors, including BLV guests, better understand 18th- and 19th-century printing presses.

By incorporating these various elements, we hope that guests with disabilities feel that their stories and communities are included in the narrative. Many of the accessible resources we are planning can also benefit visitors without disabilities. Universal design can help remove the stigma behind disability and accessible services, deepen nondisabled people’s understanding of disability, and inspire empathy for others.

As we wrote this article and considered how the Museum’s focus on accessibility has evolved from its early days to now, one of the biggest things that stood out to us was how long some of these projects took to develop, such as our tactile map, which is still in testing mode four years after its inception. Institutions can often feel pressure to make meaningful changes as soon as possible when beginning their accessibility journeys, but our time with these projects, however long, has been incredibly valuable to our understanding of access and the complexity and diversity of the disabled experience. Just as we do not consider the story of the American Revolution to be complete, we do not think of our accessibility work as complete either. As we move forward, we hope to continue strengthening our community-partner relationships, deepening our knowledge of disability studies, and making our museum feel as welcoming as possible to as many people as possible.

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Meg Bowersox is Manager of Gallery Interpretation at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. mbowersox@amrevmuseum.org  

Jenn Tham is Education Coordinator at the Museum of the American Revolution. jtham@amrevmuseum.org  

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[i]             Alice Wong, ed., Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (Vintage Books, 2020), 83.

[ii]             “An Ongoing Revolution: A Summary of the Interpretive Plan of the Museum of the American Revolution,” Museum of the American Revolution, 2021, https://moar-media-production.s3.amazonaws.com/b5c0148d-e423-4cff-a922-ce871a8e8602/document_020521_MoAR_Interpretive_Plan_Shortened_spreads.pdf

[iii]            Stephenson expressed his admiration for the Royal Armouries Museum’s usage of life-size tableaus of battle scenes, immersive play environments where visitors could interact with replica weapons, and daily combat demonstrations by costumed educators.

[iv]            Heather Pressman and Danielle Schulz, The Art of Access: A Practical Guide for Museum Accessibility (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 77–91.

[v]            The need for an audio descriptive tour in addition to a touch tour can best be summarized by Georgina Kleege and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of “gaining disability,” where individuals with disabilities gain new perspectives and creative, resourceful ways of interacting with their environment instead of the typical perception of disability as a deficit or limitation. In an interview with David Gissen, guest editor of the historic preservation journal Future Anterior, Kleege explained how touch experiences at museums can ignore the fact that blind people use other senses besides touch to experience the world. She argued that providing touchable objects without audio description or interpretation perpetuates the prioritization of sight, “as if looking at art is just about identifying the objects depicted. There are all sorts of aspects of texture, temperature, density, and sonarity.” While audio description was part of our original touch tour, we saw an opportunity to expand access to the rich collection of art and objects in our galleries, instead of a few, select handling objects (David Gissen and Georgina Kleege, “More Than Meets the Eye: Georgina Kleege,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 16, no. 1 (2019): 58, doi.org/10.5749/futuante.16.1.0057).

[vi]            Fiona Candlin also explores the separate experiences of touch and sight in her article, “The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (2006): doi.org/10.1177/147041290606690.

[vii]           Since 2018, the Gordon and Llura Gund 1993 Foundation has generously supported the Museum’s work in making accessible improvements to our facilities and programs.

[viii]           “The Right to Spontaneity,” Transdisciplinary Design, The New School for Social Research at Parsons School of Design, November 17, 2013, https://sds.parsons.edu/transdesign/the-right-to-spontaneity/.

[ix]            “3D-Printed Tents Bring Hands-On Learning to Witness to Revolution Exhibit for Guests with Visual Disabilities,” Museum of the American Revolution, accessed July 21, 2025, https://www.amrevmuseum.org/3d-printed-tents-bring-hands-on-learning-to-witness-to-revolution-exhibit-for-guests-with-visual-disabilities.

[x]             Ibid.