Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Blind People are the ones who should be asked what a hall full of exhibits actually gives them, and Tactile Images opens with a version of that question, observing that a visitor who is Blind arriving at a local aquarium finds little within reach of the hands. The company assigns 80 percent of human learning to sight, counts more than 285 million Blind People and People with Low Vision, and describes its purpose as making visual knowledge accessible to them worldwide in service of their freedom and equality. Its custom creations are built to be taken in by hand across art, history and science. Everything in that lineup points at the institutions holding the collections rather than at the visitor, because the problem is the design of the room, not the person in it.
The most damning number the company publishes concerns autonomy: seven in ten Blind People and People with Low Vision come away from an art museum without any sense of it. That figure describes what galleries do, not what visitors lack. Set against it is the kind of object the company builds, such as the full size lake sturgeon at the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, 53 inches long and mounted clear of its surroundings so a hand can follow the pointed snout, the four barbels beneath it, the bony plates ridging its sides and back, the pectoral and dorsal fins, and the tail with its longer upper lobe. Braille text and labeled buttons sit beside the company's raised panels. A gallery that plans from the outset for objects a visitor can examine by hand stops manufacturing that autonomy figure, and a gallery that does not keeps manufacturing it.
Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, supplies the standard the company prints on its own front page: success does not depend on sight, but information reaching people on equal terms does, and the next ground to take is access to the images themselves rather than words offered in their place. Tactile Images and Getty Images have set out to bring 45 million pictures into a form that can be felt. The company's braille labels and buttons show that description still has work to do, and yet a description handed over instead of the picture is not the picture. Counting information reaching people on equal terms as satisfied by a few narrated sentences leaves Blind People holding an account of the work while other visitors are given the work.
None of this needs inventing. A partnership between the Nebraska state commission serving Blind People and People with Low Vision and that state's museums has produced a pattern that other state bodies, commissions and cultural institutions can follow so that exhibitions are accessible to Blind People and People with Low Vision. Ready made traveling exhibitions circulate worldwide so an institution can begin now rather than later, custom installations can be built for a particular hall, and the company already works with museums, schools and commercial organizations, which covers the field and leaves no category of venue holding a reason to wait. Community Builders carry the work of removing barriers as a shared responsibility, owned personally by each of us and enacted collectively through decisions made in consultation with People with Disabilities, from planning through ongoing improvement. Ask the Blind People in your own community what met them the last time they walked into a museum, and let them answer for themselves.
Read the Full Article: Tactile Images.
By: John Olson
