Over the Easter weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting Vienna with my family. Vienna is a city known for its musical heritage with composers including Mozart and Beethoven residing and working there at various points in their lives. And of course, who can forget the influence of the Strauss family?
However, Vienna is also known for its palaces and museums, many of which offer audio guides. Whilst this is in principle a great help if you are vision impaired, not all of them were as accessible for vision impaired people as they could have been? So what makes an accessible audio guide?
When audio guides are put together, there often appears to be an assumption that the user can see what is being discussed/referred to. However, this won’t always be the case and the consequence is that the narrative can be very difficult to follow/understand if the user is vision impaired. An example of a really good audio guide is that of the Titanic Belfast, which was/is designed on the assumption that the user could not see what was being referred to. This significantly increases the likelihood of a vision impaired person leaving a museum or palace with a genuine idea of what was there and it’s historical significance.
There is then the question of operating audio guides. As an example, the audio guides in Vienna all came with braille labels on the keypad, which was good to see. However, one needed to be able to see in order to know the number that should be pressed in a given room. If the user is vision impaired, this is likely to reduce their overall independence. An alternative is to have users scan QR codes. But again, you need to see in order to know where the QR code is.
A really good example of an accessible audio guide from an operational perspective is that of Alcatraz, where the guide moves on automatically as the user moves through the tour.
Too often, audio guides are designed by sighted users. For a truly inclusive offer, such guides should involved blind and vision impaired users in their construction so that they offer as much a comprehensive experience as possible.