Universal Design – American Alliance of Museums

Out of Sight: How Museums Can Harness the Blind Perspective to Enrich Visitor Experiences

By Violet Rose Arma

Do blind people enjoy visiting museums? Yes and no. Cheryl Fogle-Hatch and Don Winiecki captured this complicated reality in 2020, when they conducted a survey of blind adults discussing their feelings about museums. Here were a few of the …
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 …
Handy Bionics

By Elizabeth Merritt

#robotics #prosthetics #disability Follow the link in the photo caption to the associated story. You can find more glimpses of the future (and links) on CFM’s Pintere…
Reaching Behind the Glass

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’ve long admired the creativity and ingenuity of the Manchester Museum—following their exploits from inviting a hermit to live in the museum for forty days and forty nights and while engaging the public in an examination of what …
What’s the Point of a Museum Website?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Ignite Smithsonian. Many of you have probably already heard that on April 11 the auditorium of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian was packed from 10 a.m.– 12:30 p.m. with people talking about museums, technology …
Thoughts on the Digitization of Museum Collections

By Elizabeth Merritt

When The Pinky Show asked attendees of the 2010 AAM Annual Meeting what they thought about the digitization of museum collections, it was on no one’s radar that Google was planning to do exactly that with the Google Art Project. …
Mining MyCulture: serving the community of creative consumers

By Elizabeth Merritt

The CFM report Museums & Society 2034 explored a trend we dubbed “MyCulture”—a rising generation demonstrating an extraordinarily high level of creative output and creative consumption. This week’s guest blogger, Allison Thurman, …
Future of Accessibility

By Elizabeth Merritt

Why is accessibility a futurist issue? Because, trends being what they are, we face a future in which a growing proportion of American society will have accessibility challenges. For example: Today, 1in 8 Americans are older than 65. In …
Forecasting the Future of Accessibility in Museums

By Elizabeth Merritt

I am getting ready for a presentation at the Leadership and Excellence in Accessible Design (LEAD) conference to be held at the Kennedy Center later this month. The presentation will ask and try to answer two big questions—what will the …