Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut”

According to the 2000 United States Census Report, persons with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, with 49.7 million (19.3% of the population aged five and older, or one in five persons) claiming to have a long lasting condition or disability (Waldrop & Stern, 2003, p. 1). While the population of individuals with specific disabilities is typically a very small percentage of the overall populace, currently averaging six-eight percent for severe vision impairments for example, the combined number of disabled persons is larger than any ethnic minority in the United States (Waldrop & Stern, 2003, p. 5). Furthermore, as the “baby boomer” generation reaches retirement age in 2011, the fastest growing segment of the United States population will be over 65 (Hobbs, 2002). This demographic is twice as likely to have a physical disability than working age persons, and six times as likely to have sensory impairments (Waldrop & Stern, 2003, p. 4).

Several scholars have made the argument that disability cannot be so easily measured, as many people with varying degrees of physical and sensory difficulties do not identify themselves as “disabled,” suggesting instead that all individuals fall on a continuum of physical and mental abilities (Vanderheiden, 1990; O’Hara 2004). Indeed, disability rights advocates are quick to point out, “If we all live long enough, we’ll all be disabled. We are all TABS–temporarily able-bodied” and living in a world designed by and for an “ableist” majority (Brueggemann, 2001, p. 369). A report produced by the National Council on Disability (NCD) strongly argued that the obstacles facing the disabled online are a direct result of the lack of attention paid to their needs by web developers:

The reasons people with disabilities lack access to information in our society are perhaps more significant and certainly more within our control than the lack itself. The explanation increasingly lies not in disability, but in the design of the technology that mediates our access to and use of all types of information. (Bristo et al., 2001, p. 1)

While disabilities scholar Jason Palmeri (2006) has argued that all technology in effect produces a mediated experience, and all computer applications can be considered assistive devices (p. 58), the question that is seldom asked is: whose needs were considered in the design and whose were neglected? Instead of being technology and feature driven, usability expert Whitney Quesenbery insisted that the goals of people who are intended to use the product should be considered first and foremost early in the design phase:

When you start the decision-making process, if you have not asked the right questions, if you have not considered all of the people who will use a product, all of the requirements, you will get a product that has not considered them as well. (Quesenbery, 2004, p. 5)

As Robert Regan, Senior Product Manager for Accessibility at Macromedia (now Adobe), related at the Designing for the 21st Century conference in 2004, accessibility is a process, not a product, and there currently are no clearly defined methods for implementing or testing rich-media applications. Yet accessibility most certainly will not happen by accident.

Steven Jacobs, Accessibility Program Manager for NCR Corporation and one of the initiators of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), noted in a research report in 2002 prepared for the World Bank Conference on Disability and Development the rather surprising ways in which the electronic “curb cut” paved the way for accessibility during the past two centuries. Many now commonplace electronic innovations, including the typewriter and telephone, were invented with the intention of helping the blind and deaf communicate, respectively. The microphone, transistor, RPM records and tape recorder were also spawned by the “special” needs of the hearing and vision-impaired communities. Surprisingly, the development in 1972 of the ARPANET protocols used to enable email was motivated by Vinton Cerf’s need to communicate with his deaf wife. Additionally, personal digital assistants (PDAs), scanners, vibrating pagers, electronic keyboards and the television captioning system were all developed specifically for persons with disabilities, yet they continue to benefit a much larger public than originally intended (Jacobs, 2002). Today, as accessibility advocate Joseph (Joe) Clark pointed out, “hearing people are the majority audience for captioning,” as evidenced by the frequency of captioned television available in most bars and gyms across America (Clark, 2001).

The physical “curb cut,” initiated in 1990 with the passing of the ADA, was controversial on many fronts (Perry, 2003; Russell, 1998), yet it symbolized a public commitment to equitable access to facilities and employment for persons with special needs and diverse abilities. Cities and rural towns across America bore the burden and expense of demolishing the inaccessible curbs at every intersection and replacing them with the sloped versions we use today. All public facilities in America, including museums, were also required to make allowances for the disabled in the form of ramps, rails, elevators, larger doorways and bathroom stalls.

Universal access principles began to influence the design of exhibitions, most significantly in the design of science museum interactive exhibits (Reich, 2006; Davidson, 1999). Exhibition designers could no longer take for granted that not all visitors could see, hear, move around and interact with the exhibits in the same way. Art museums also stepped up to the challenge and created tactile, raised prints of artworks and audio tours for the blind to experience art. Guided tours in sign language have also been offered in museum galleries to accommodate the deaf. Bruce Hannah’s 1998 exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York entitled “Unlimited by Design” focused exclusively on inclusive exhibition design and proved that accessibility does not require lower aesthetic standards (Fox & Forloney, 2003).

In New York, the Museum Accessibility Consortium (MAC) was founded in the mid 1990’s to provide a forum for addressing accessibility issues specific to museums.

MAC was recreated with a broader purpose: believing that the strongest institutional commitment to accessibility occurs when all departments share in the responsibility for physical, programmatic, and attitudinal accessibility, the group sought to include individuals from all departments of museums and cultural institutions. (McGinnis, 1999)

Today there are over 60 institutions participating in the New York Metro area in the MAC training, workshops, and discussion forums. Similarly, the Museums and Galleries Disability Association (MAGDA) in the United Kingdom promotes awareness of accessibility and “exists to provide a forum for museum, gallery and culture-sector professionals to share information and expertise in addressing the needs of disabled users” (Poole, 2005). MAGDA publishes the “Barrierfree” online newsletter, yet only member organizations are permitted to view their publications.

The “curb cut” facing museums today is digital; governments around the world are beginning to pass legislation requiring equitable access to online public information for persons with disabilities. In the United States, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act mandates government-funded agencies and institutions, including museums who receive state or federal funds, to ensure their web sites are “accessible” to people who use assistive technologies to digitally overcome their physical and sensory impairments. The Disability Discrimination Act similarly went into effect in the United Kingdom in 2004. Despite these imperatives, the authors of “The Accessible Future” report, published by the National Council on Disability in the United States argued, “laws cannot do what people resist” (Bristo et al., 2001, p. 4). Critics view disability legislation, particularly in the United States, as an “unfunded mandate” that is purely voluntary in compliance. In response to the government’s apparent lack of commitment to prosecuting organizations that “defer compliance [to Section 508] indefinitely,” disability activist Marta Russell quipped: “let them eat unenforceable civil rights” (Russell, 1998, p. 132). The lack of enforcement of Section 508, coupled with the inability to clearly decipher the guiding principles of the legislation have encouraged museum professionals to passively relinquish responsibility for providing equitable access to digital content online. The lengthy and often intellectually inaccessible guidelines for producing accessible content have the reverse effect of inducing apathy and neglect for accessibility. Human factors researchers at University of Rome, La Sapienza, asserted:

Even though talk about accessibility has become commonplace, never in history has there been as much confusion about accessibility as in this day and age. To say the least, the confusion has a lot to do with the meaning of accessibility and taking responsibilities for accessibility facilitation.
(Mirabella, Kimani, Gabrielli & Catarci, 2004, p. 165)

Over the past decade, museums with adequate budget and staff have gradually increased their level of technological proficiency. Simple brochure-ware web sites have evolved into portals to engaging and interactive educational content. Yet, Lyn Elliot Sherwood, Executive Director, Heritage in the Canadian Public Service, reasoned that while museums were at the “threshold of a wonderful new universe” in the mid to late 90’s, their multimedia efforts at that time were largely experimental and lacked user focus:

Our experiments to date have focused on developing our technical knowledge of how to generate information in digital form, rather than on gaining a more fundamental insight into how learning may be enhanced through the new possibilities offered by multimedia presentation–or even which approaches will prove most satisfying to various audiences. (Sherwood, 1997, p. 134)

However, it must be remembered that museums are not software companies; user interface design, application development, media production and usability testing are not core competencies of cultural heritage institutions. Yet, multimedia development, particularly with Flash and Java-based projects, increasingly reflects the design and technical challenges of application development. Thus, museums must rely on the expertise of technical consultants while contractually ensuring that those responsible for the design and development take accessibility and usability into account. At the Smithsonian’s “Museums for the New Millennium” Symposium in 1996, Allisandra Cummins related, “…museums largely have been involved in serving a very minute proportion of their potential audience.” Cummins eloquently pointed to the frequency of technology harnessing the museum, resulting in institutional goals being “buried under the burden of the byte” (Weil, 1996, p. 76).

Recent advances in assistive technology (AT) have unlocked the vast potential of the Internet for cultural learning for persons with disabilities. Individuals who are not able to physically visit a museum due to impairments (or geography) are no longer excluded from experiencing the treasure troves of cultural knowledge collected and exhibited by museums across the globe. The “burden of the byte” still exists today, yet it has grown to include the responsible use of technology to communicate with all citizens regardless of their physical and sensory limitations. Adhering to the principles of universal design and usability require that human needs are considered at the start and throughout the design and development processes. As evidenced by the rising importance of visitor studies, museums have already begun to make the necessary paradigm shift towards providing visitor-centered experiences. Lynne Teather, Associate Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Toronto argued, “People then, not the object or the information, are at the centre of the museum experience” (Teather, 1998, para. 9). Katie Streten (2000), formerly the Website Manager at the Science Museum in London also spoke of online visitors as “honoured guests whose input should be highly valued” (para. 5). Kenneth Hamma, Executive Director for Digital Policy and Initiatives at the J. Paul Getty Trust, cautioned that the motivations and behaviors of the “new kind of visitor,” meaning the virtual visitor, are “too frequently overlooked” (Hamma, 2004, p. 3). The specific needs of online audiences should be continually analyzed from usability and cost-benefit perspectives to ensure proper usage of resources:

If the development of an exhibition website costs $60,000 and is seen by 10 times the number of people who visit the museum galleries for the same exhibition, is that a good use of resources? (Hamma, 2004, p. 3)

The next logical step is to evaluate the online visitor’s learning experience to insure that the technology is transparent to the user, and is easy to learn and customize for varying displays and modalities. After all, the often-forgotten goal of technology is “to serve human needs” (Mumford, 1934, as cited in Shneiderman, 2002, p. 77) and “the experience that technology delivers is much more important than the technology itself” (Mintz, 1998, p. 30). Benjamin Shneiderman, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and Founding Director of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), also spoke of the “natural evolution from technological capacity to human capability,” and favors a flexible, user-centered approach towards user-interface development (Shneiderman, 2002, p. 60). He argued that universally usable “designs should accommodate novices, non-English speakers, the disabled, the elderly, the anxious, and low-motivated users” (p. 70).

The museum community began to take the usability and accessibility of their web content seriously at the start of the new millennium. In the United Kingdom, the Museums Libraries and Archives (MLA) association commissioned a series of reports to assess the current provision for accessibility of 340 member sites. The 2001 audit reported that museums have focused almost exclusively on physical access requirements and have seriously neglected the online access needs of disabled users. While there were a few pioneers in the field, online support for persons with sensory or learning disabilities was largely uneven in the United Kingdom and dependent upon a few committed individuals instead of an integrated accessibility policy at the organizational level.

The participants had generally found a lack of coordinated, easily identifiable and accessible information about best practice. If these pioneers who are actively seeking information have difficulties, then the less committed may find it almost impossible. (MLA, 2001, p. 12)
London Southbank University conducted a similar survey of museum web sites in 2003 on a smaller scale. The web sites of 25 museums in the United Kingdom and 25 internationally were analyzed through automated processes. The result revealed that less than half (40%) of United Kingdom museums met basic priority one requirements, and a remarkable 28% of international museum sites passed the first checkpoint (Bowen, 2003). Additionally, James Devine, Head of Multimedia at the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, conducted accessibility studies and found that the lack of time, money and knowledge (in that order), as well as poor planning contributed to the lack of accessibility in Scottish museum web sites (Devine, Gibson & Kane, 2004, p. 38). In 2005, the MLA published a second audit and found that less than half (42%) of the 300 sites reviewed meet basic accessibility guidelines when tested automatically. User testing was also conducted with disabled people, and the report noted that 22% of problems experienced by the users were not even discovered through automated testing (Petrie et al., 2005). The authors presented a strong argument for developing accessibility policies and involving the disabled community in the design and development process:

Web accessibility is an essential dimension of an accessible museum, library or archive and of inspiring Learning for All, the transformational framework for the sector. We owe it to disabled people and our values of access and inclusion that we make web accessibility integral to our Web development processes. (p. 1)

The MLA audits provided quantitative analyses of web accessibility in the cultural heritage sector in the United Kingdom. The research presented herein differs in a number of respects: American museums are at the forefront of the study, with a smaller amount of data collected from international museums for comparison purposes; this study focuses on multimedia and not HTML-based web technologies; lastly, the surveys and case studies conducted assess current attitudes and organization practices instead of actual usability and accessibility statistics.

Another project of great interest to the author is the Multimodal Museum Interfaces project (MUMMI). In Finland, a unique collaboration between museum educators, curators, graphic and interface designers and disabled audiences was initiated in 2001. The goal of the three-year project involving the Finnish National Gallery’s Art Museum and the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design, Helsinki was to innovate new methodologies for improving the accessibility of diverse audiences to cultural heritage information. The tremendous potential for multimodal interfaces to facilitate online cultural learning was explored from a constructivist learning approach and maintained focus on the visitor. The MUMMI project leaders theorized:

Museums exist for people. Although new people are reached through the Internet, the content supply may not necessarily be accessible to the same degree. Thus more attention needs to be paid in the content design phase on who is using the product, how, where and why. (Haapalainen & Mäenpää, 2003, p. 14)

The MUMMI project clearly serves as inspiration for case studies and a model for proactive initiatives of accessible design in the museum community. The multidisciplinary collaboration, viewed as a necessity by the participants, also outlines the pervasive influence of accessibility considerations across the content, design and development phases.

There is some evidence that the museum community has begun to realize the importance of accessibility in technical communications, yet the paradigm shift required to change the way multimedia projects are designed and produced has not yet occurred. Liddy Nevile, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Advanced Computing Research Centre at La Trobe University, and Charles McCathie-Nevile, Chief Standards Officer of Opera Software, argued that best practices for accessible design require a “ramp” integrated into design from the start, beginning in the initial design process (Nevile & McCathie-Nevile, 2002). To provide disabled online visitors with “the sense of inclusion and an equal opportunity to participate,” the reliance on graphical user interfaces as the sole means of interaction and communication must be reduced and information should be available through redundant modalities (p. 3). The problem appears to be the lack of a clear set of design practices to follow for achieving this end. Karen O’Hara, researcher of disability studies at Miami University, also urged technical communicators to think differently throughout the product development cycle in order to accommodate audiences of differing abilities (O’Hara, 2004).

Several technical projects have been undertaken to explore the delivery of accessible multimedia through a variety of devices. The Dayton Art Institute at Wright State University developed a virtual museum tour and an accessibility style guide based on the WCAG 1.0 specification. The authors of this joint research project concluded:

It is important to note that [WCAG 1.0] Guideline 1 does not prohibit the use of multimedia such as images and sounds, but rather suggests how to convey that content in different ways so all users can understand its meaning. (Anable and Alonzo, 2001, para. 7)

The EMBASSI project, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research in 1999, took this initiative one step further and created a technical protocol for delivering information through an amodal layer to mobile devices. The pilot project consisted of a customizable mobile platform that would enable disabled persons to interact with public kiosks through modality independent controls. The researchers concluded:

“It is impossible to draw a distinct line between regular users and so-called users with special needs. … Universal accessibility has to be treated as an integral part of software engineering rather than being packed into toolkits and supportive add-ons” (Richter and Hellenschmidt, 2004, p. 7).

Likewise, exhibition designs, whether physical or virtual, need to consider the potential access issues of all users from the beginning. Janice Majewski, Smithsonian Institution Accessibility Program Coordinator, insisted on the “abolition of meeting the special needs veneer” in order to provide sensory and intellectual accessibility for all of the museums audiences (Majewski & Bunch, 1998). Disability studies scholars Paul Jaeger, Florida State University and Cynthia Bowman, Ashland University, Ohio, argued that disability simply must be seen as “ordinary” (Jaeger, & Bowman, 2005, p. ix) and not a special case to be accommodated.

Similarly, the Mathers Museum of World Cultures created MUSEpad, “a mobile computing tool for use in museums that will enable individuals with disabilities an opportunity to customize and optimize their learning experiences in museums” (Kirk, 2001, para. 1). While the MUSEpad, EMBASSI and Dayton projects focused on the technical implementation and usability testing of pilot projects, the research presented herein explores similar strategies through case studies.

In addition, several recent projects have focused on the non-technical aspects of elearning accessibility, including the WED project sponsored by the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. The web site supporting the 2003 Edvard Munch exhibition held at Staatliche Museen in Berlin employed “oral browsing” strategies. This unique approach considered the interaction between the online visitor and their computer (and by proxy, the museum) a dialogue, and interactions were designed to mimic natural language in a conversation (Di Blas, Paolini, Speron & Bienert, 2003). Mirabella et al. (2004), human factors researchers at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, also proposed that not all accessibility issues are technical. They brought attention to the need for didactic guidelines to enable content creators to more fully participate in the design process. By understanding the difference and interplay between physical and logical accessibility, the authors suggested that content developers are better able to match learning content to appropriate media for the four main types of disabilities. Museum education researchers Lynn Dierking and John Falk (1998) also place a high value on intellectual accessibility and diverse learning styles. They professed: “Learning is a highly personal, idiosyncratic process. People have preferred modes of perceiving and processing information” (p. 59). The current research draws on constructivist learning theory as one of many motivations for producing accessible multimedia.

Most recently, Stephen Brown and David Gerrard of Knowledge Media Design, De Montfort University, UK, presented an analysis of the accessibility of two award-winning museum web sites, The Making of the Modern World created by the Science Museum, London and Transport Archive by Leicestershire County Council. Both sites were Museums and the Web 2005 Best of the Web winners, yet the authors revealed the accessibility barriers inherent in the design of the multimedia. The authors questioned:

Why is it that, despite extensive guidelines and checklists, cultural heritage web sites in general, and even those regarded as exemplars of good practice, still exhibit significant accessibility issues? (Brown & Gerrard, 2006, p. 9)

Their detailed analysis and criteria for assessing usability and accessibility of multimedia featured several Best of the Web 2006 nominated sites as case studies. Brown and Gerrard argued, “Accessibility for disabled people is a challenge that museums cannot afford to ignore” (2006, p. 2). The cost of neglecting accessibility in multimedia can be a reduction in the diversity of audiences and possibly of funding sources.

In an address to multimedia developers, Robert Regan, Senior Product Manager for Accessibility at Macromedia (now Adobe), eloquently warned that despite the advocacy, legislation and guidelines, much has yet to be understood:

The current state of accessibility represents a failure of the imagination…. Addressing rich media content will serve as a pivotal moment in the history of accessibility and design…. Dismissing the accessibility of rich media formats will not make them go away. (Regan, 2004, para. 4)

The author sees Regan’s statement as a creative challenge and understands the great potential multimedia has to engage a wide variety of online visitors with diverse needs. It is hoped that a clear understanding of current barriers to accessibility, along with examples of accessible multimedia to emulate, will help the museum community reap the benefits of the “digital curb cut.”