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All Access Pass: Making a Small Museum Disabled-Friendly

By Nancy Richner, Fran Prezant and Pearl Rosen

This article was published in Museum News July/August 2006.

There are more than 50 million people with disabilities in the United States today. Many of these individuals attend public schools, are part of the work force, live independently and are increasingly visible members of every community. Many of those 50 million are elderly, a group that has long been a healthy slice of the museum-going audience.

Museums of all types have been grappling with how best to  offer access to people with disabilities since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in the early 1990s. But access is not just a legal and moral obligation. Changes that increase access for those with disabilities can mean more visitors, since most people don’t attend museums alone. In other words, enabling one person with a disability to visit often brings at least two people to the museum. Access also benefits all visitors; for example, no one will complain about more seating in galleries.

Small museums across the country are facing some common challenges—small staffs, restrictive spaces, limited funding—challenges that require strategic and collaborative efforts. Some have found innovative ways to increase access: the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York has provided video and virtual tours to those who can’t access the historic structure; the South Street Seaport has made its website accessible; numerous museums have conducted staff training to increase awareness about the needs of visitors with disabilities. This may include providing information about people with disabilities.  Or it could mean museum educators and docents adapting presentation techniques (such as being sure the speaker is always visible to those with hearing loss, being aware that people who are blind may need visual information described verbally to them). The fact is, no matter how limited the staff or funding, you can usually start with some action if you utilize your resources well.

At the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., we were able to make changes in keeping with the broad mission of sharing collections with the public and also increase the reach to wider audiences, including individuals with disabilities. Through a collaboration between this small museum and a nonprofit disability organization, and in consultation with stakeholders from the community, we were able to increase access for our community more than any one of us could have done alone.

The museum, with 11 full-time and 10 part-time staff members, is situated on 145 acres of the historic Bryce-Frick estate on Long Island in an elegant neo-Georgian mansion. The museum features mostly 19th- to 21st-century works installed in the former living quarters of this historic home. Exhibitions, which take up the vast majority of our gallery space, change four times a year and feature nationally and internationally known artists. There is also a contemporary gallery of changing exhibitions and a growing permanent collection. The rolling grounds contain a formal garden, several ponds, meadows, an art studio and an outdoor sculpture collection.

The setting is beautiful and the collections are rich, but access is a different story. The house was built on the highest part of the property, as was typical for the type of impressive home it aimed to be. To get to it, one must climb seven steps. The massive front steps are totally inaccessible to wheelchair users and anyone with impaired mobility. In addition, the pathways leading to the museum from the parking areas also include stairs—sometimes only a single step, but without alternate access, one step can be enough to keep someone away. Also, the elevator within the museum was historic and problematic. Small, with a gate that pulled closed from the inside, it could accommodate a few people, perhaps even a manual wheelchair user. With more modern, heavier and larger power chairs, it was impossible to have several people in the elevator at once. The grounds, though beautiful and landscaped, are expansive and hilly with rugged, mostly grass-covered terrain. This meant that visitors in wheelchairs or with limited mobility would miss seeing many of the sculptures. In addition, the constantly changing exhibitions meant that there were few permanent signs and no alternative descriptive information (Braille or audio) for people with low vision, blindness or deafness, or hearing loss.

We knew that we needed to do something to help our visitors, so we began with relationships we already had established. In addition to being located near the Helen Keller National Center, an organization that assists people who are deaf-blind, the museum became involved in a partnership with Abilities! (formerly the National Center for Disability Services), a nonprofit that works to increase independence, self-sufficiency and full participation for people with disabilities. It also runs the Henry Viscardi School for K-12 children with severe physical disabilities. Both these students and residents from the Helen Keller Center began visiting more often.

The National Organization on Disability’s recent Harris Poll surveys indicate that people with significant disabilities do not participate as much in their communities as they would like. Our own survey conducted by Abilities! elaborates on some of the reasons. We found that people with disabilities have limited access to spaces, exhibits and tours within museums and often lack information about available programs and services as well as alternative modes of information delivery (i.e., Braille or large print, sign interpretation, infrared- or FM-assisted listening devices). We also realized that the staff was not trained to understand the needs of disabled visitors.

With these obstacles in mind, the museum and Abilities! worked together to assess physical and programmatic accessibility. The museum then initiated physical changes, including making a restroom accessible, adding ramps, renovating obstacles in pathways and acquiring county money to replace the elevator.

A group of elementary students with severe mobility disabilities from the Viscardi School became our first ad hoc advisory group. After viewing the grounds by bus they toured the property pathways and museum. They were then asked to provide feedback through written surveys on what they found accessible and what they found difficult. They were also given the opportunity to offer suggestions on accommodations. Staff conducted discussions with the children, and the results made it clear that our plans did not really address all the issues that the children brought to light. The ramps and pathways were inaccessible, they had difficulty traversing the property in wheelchairs, and some of the artworks and the elevator were too high. All these issues were later addressed—most notably by changing the entrance stairs to ramps on the sculpture pathways.

The limitations in staff and funding required us to implement changes in phases. We determined that the outdoor sculpture collection would be a good first step, largely because the works are permanent, unlike the changing gallery exhibitions. With seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts and a small grant from the Altria Foundation, the project team of art educators from the museum as well as disability and art specialists from Abilities! developed and refined the project.

Abilities! technical support staff developed a prototype of an interactive computer station that contained text and visual information about the sculptures. In addition, we recruited specialists from Art Education for the Blind to design the tactile drawings and a teacher from the Viscardi School to reproduce the tactile images, which translate sculpture into raised line drawings. With the help of an educational vision specialist from the Henry Viscardi School, we developed accompanying touch tours and created verbal descriptions and print and Braille text for those works.

A pilot group of adults with vision disabilities eagerly participated in evaluating the tactile drawings with accompanying verbal descriptions and then participated in a touch tour. They found that exploring the 8.5-by-11-inch tactile drawings before a touch tour enhanced their perception of the artwork. Adding a preliminary session with verbal descriptions helped these visitors understand the dimensions and scale of the sculptures. For visitors who have difficulty walking, an interactive computer program was designed and placed in an accessible area of the museum. It presents visual, print and audio information on the sculptures in an alternate format that includes multiple photographs of each work, background on the artist and information on the work and other works by the artists.

After these initial actions, we convened a focus group of advisory members who provided feedback on what we had done and steps to take in the next phase. As a result of the focus group and our experiences with other participants in this project, we have a clearer understanding of who we are and a better picture of our audience and what we can realistically offer.

We are now looking at the broader needs of our senior public and how best to serve them. It is an ongoing process and one that serves both the public and our own growth. The project is small in scale but deep in the potential impact and statement about the need for access for all and to all museums.

Resources for Small Museums

Below are just a few of the many resources for finding information on creating accessible programs and facilities.

Nancy Richner is education program coordinator, Nassau County Museum of Art; Fran Prezant is director of research and evaluation, Abilities!; and Pearl Rosen is currently an art access consultant and college adjunct lecturer and the former arts and cultural programs coordinator at the National Center for Disability Services.

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