Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut”

As late as 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) began to require that sidewalks on public streets provide a ramp at intersections to enable wheelchair access for disabled citizens. Today, it is easy to forget that the simple innovation of the “curb cut” was the result of radical political action, comparable to the civil rights movement (Quesenbery, 2004, p. 5). We take for granted the notion that “sidewalks with curb cuts are simply better sidewalks” that benefit all persons, not just the handicapped (Jacobs, 2002, para. 1). This metaphor has gained new currency in today’s information age, as technology now has the potential to empower the disabled with unprecedented access to electronic resources. However, it has taken society more time to realize the enormous benefits the “digital curb cut” can provide to an increasingly diverse public.

In the United States, the legacy of the ADA has resulted in museums accommodating a more inclusive public. The American Association of Museums (AAM) published “Everyone’s Welcome: Universal Access in Museums” first in video format (AAM, 1996) and later as a printed handbook (Salmen, 1998) to inform museums how to address their new legal responsibilities to the public. Art museums began to question how persons with visual disabilities could experience or perceive their masterpieces in ways they had never imagined before. Science museums started to develop multi-sensory exhibits that facilitated learning through touch, smell and sound as well as sight. History and anthropology museums already understood the value of lowering the height of their display cases to encourage the participation of children. Yet, they also learned to take into account the mobility of wheelchairs within their exhibits and altered the line of sight for labels. Thus, cultural facilities were encouraged by the legislation of the ADA to produce innovative exhibition designs that offered improved user-friendliness and learning opportunities for all persons, regardless of their abilities.

American museums are not alone in the pursuit of accessibility, as legislation in more than 25 countries across the globe has been enacted to protect the information rights of persons with disabilities. Australia and the United Kingdom have their own versions of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and the European Union launched the “eEurope Information Society for All” initiative in late 1999 to address the accessibility of web content in the public sector. The Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in the United Kingdom provides praise and recognition for cultural organizations that are models of excellence in accessibility through the annual “Jodi Awards.” The Museum Computer Group (MCG) and the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester partnered with the MLA to develop this one of a kind initiative. Thus, there is plenty for American museums to learn from exemplary practice abroad.

The combined growth in awareness of universal design and visitor studies in the museum community helped to propel the development of inclusive museum experiences in the late nineties. Yet, museums have hardly begun to contemplate how visitors of all abilities can navigate their growing libraries of virtual resources. This is particularly true with multimedia materials, where there is surprisingly little focus in the museum community on the need for accessible design. Videos are more often than not published online without captions or video descriptions; transcripts are not provided for podcasts; Flash or Java-based learning applications make no provision for mouse-less navigation, customizable interfaces, or interoperability with screen readers or magnifiers that enable sight-impaired visitors to access online content through auditory means.

Additionally, developers do not embrace accessible practices unless their client demands contractually that they take disabled users into account. Usability testing with members of the disabled community is rarely done for any number of reasons. This gets closer to the heart of the issue, as it is very unclear in the museum community who should take responsibility for accessibility in multimedia design. In-house web development teams have reactively learned how to retrofit their sites with accessible HTML code and there are many methods available to automatically validate accessible coding practices. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, considered the digital counterpart of the ADA that came into effect in 2000, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 guidelines focus on technical specifications for HTML-based code with very little mention of multimedia. To date, there is no easy way to validate the accessibility of multimedia applications, and most institutions have simply neglected this aspect of their online educational programming.

This research explores the bridging of technological resources with user-centered design for the purpose of making online cultural learning more accessible and usable by diverse audiences. Two surveys have been designed to reveal the perceived and real barriers inherent in accessible multimedia design within the museum community. Three case studies provide specific examples of how these barriers to accessibility are being addressed by museums and the developers who create their multimedia applications.

As the process of negotiating responsibility for accessibility involves a team of multi-disciplinary representatives, both inside and outside the museum, the attitudes and practices of media and technology staff in museums are surveyed in addition to external multimedia developers. The museum survey focuses on American museums of all types who publish educational multimedia online, and a sampling of international sites for comparison. The motivations for either the support or neglect of accessible media practices are explored. Three case studies highlight the specific individuals and institutions that have embraced accessible media practices, detailing their processes and challenges. The case studies include online multimedia projects produced by the Library of Congress, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and the Tate Modern, London.

Recent legislative and demographic trends illustrate the implications of not embracing accessible media design. Various organizations including Target Corporation, AOL, the Sydney Olympic Games Committee and the California Community Colleges have all been sued for not providing accessible online content for the disabled (Sliwa, 2006; National Federation of the Blind, 2000; Creed, 2000). As a result, states are beginning to expand their interpretation of the ADA to include commercial and educational web sites. Additionally, Disability Rights has emerged as a civil rights issue in academic circles, as demonstrated by important scholarship and the rise in Disability Studies in universities (Linton, 1998; Brueggemann et al., 2001; Jaeger & Bowman, 2005; Palmeri, 2006). Furthermore, businesses are beginning to tout the commercial benefits of accessible design practices with the recent release of the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 78 in the United Kingdom (Howell, 2006).

According to the United States Census Bureau, there are 49.7 million Americans (19.3% of the population) with a long-lasting condition or disability, or one in five civilians 19.3% aged five and older (Waldrop & Stern, 2003, p. 1). To compound the issue, the largest population segment, the “baby boomer” generation, will begin to reach retirement age in 2011. Census statistics have also shown that persons 65 and older are 6 times more likely than working age persons to have a sensory disability (Waldrop & Stern, 2003, p. 4), and 45% of this demographic typically have functional limitations (Vanderheiden, 1990, p. 6). Not only will this senior audience be technologically more adept than the current demographic (O’Hara, 2004), but they will also be the primary demographic for museum trustees, donors and volunteers. Museums must learn how to take into account the physical and sensory limitations of this growing audience in order to take advantage of future growth opportunities.

The next generation of online educational content published by museums will likely shift towards a proactive, user-centered approach intending to widen their audience and understand the diverse needs of their online visitors. The growth of ubiquitous mobile computing devices is also driving the need for flexible, user-configured experiences of media. As a symposium of forward-thinking technology researchers agreed as early as 1997, media producers should no longer assume that the people who want to use their media are sitting at a desk with a computer monitor, have perfect vision and hearing, and can manipulate a mouse (National Research Council, 1997). In fact, the user may be driving in a car, in a quiet gallery or library, walking down a noisy street, or be practically anywhere. Previously, these assumptions drove the format and interaction design of multimedia. Furthermore, the communication device itself may limit the ability to interact with the content to a single modality, resembling the limitations of persons with sensory disabilities.

Just as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 required cities and towns across America to rebuild their sidewalks at intersections to accommodate the disabled, creating what has been called “simply better sidewalks” for all citizens (Jacobs, 2002, para. 1), the “digital curb cut” promises to place the user’s needs and diverse requirements at the center of multimedia design.