accessibility – Page 2 – American Alliance of Museums

Partnering with the Blind to Make Exhibits More Accessible

By Carrie Christoffersen, Anil Lewis, and John Olson

The opportunity to experience photography, art, and other museum exhibits can be life-altering to a blind person. “As a blind person, when I can experience a painting on my own without asking for help, that represents increased freedom, …
Welcoming Service Dogs to Your Museum

By Kristi Moore

Service dogs are becoming more common as the years go on, and as museum professionals it can be a challenge to welcome them in among our collections. We worry about hair and dander, physical damage, and health code violations. Most of us …
Sofa So Good: A word on behalf of older folks

By Bill Tramposch

I don’t know about you, but a career in museums has made it very difficult for me to be a satisfied museum visitor. I find that I am always peering into “how the sausage is made,” as it were, noticing how the front-of-house staff interact …
The Memory Café: Creating a museum program for people with dementia

By Norman Burns

At Conner Prairie—a Smithsonian Affiliate living history museum in Fishers, Indiana—we recently debuted a program for people with Dementia and Alzheimer’s. In partnership with the Central Indiana Council on Aging (CICOA) and Dementia …
Autism in Museums: a revolution in the making

By Claire Madge

As we work to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility among museum audiences and in the workplace, we need to attend to the needs of neurodiverse visitors and employees. In today’s post, Claire Madge, founder of the …
Meet Marabou! The furry, friendly creature reimagining the museum

By Megan Elevado

When you visit a museum, do you feel empowered? Do you feel like you have authority and control of your experience? That’s why Marabou is here: to remind us that we all have agency in our museum experiences. Marabou is a rainbow-colored …
Four Things I Learned When I Started Thinking about Museum Accessibility

By Ryan Saglio

I first started working with the Disabilities community in 2011. Over the years, I’ve worked with individuals of all ages in their homes, at their jobs, and in their communities. The state I live in, Rhode Island, has had to …
A New Way to See: Looking at museums through the eyes of the blind

By Samantha Silverberg

Let’s talk about accessibility. In the twenty-first century era of inclusivity, museums are working towards making the visitor experience a more positive and unique one, as part of efforts to increase the number of visitors to museums. In …
Taking a Stand: Prisons Today, The Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site Award Winner

By Nicole Frankhouser

The Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site’s Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration exhibition won first place in the 2017 Excellence in Exhibition award presented jointly by the following Professional Networks …
Access For All: How three museums pushed the boundaries of accessibility to connect with wider audiences.

By Jill Rullkoetter

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2017 issue of Museum magazine. For more than 25 years, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a watershed piece of civil rights legislation, has helped various public …