Good morning (evening) flagship. On today’s edition of my very interesting blog, I’ll be talking about how accessible the city museum of galway is. I’m going to specifically talk about accessibility for those with visual impairments in this one, since I have a feeling a bunch of people already went into depth on the sensory room.

The first thing I noticed in the museum is that they have a lot of accommodations specifically for people with visual impairments. There was a place in the beginning where you could pick up packets that had larger versions of labels. I looked it up on their website (https://galwaycitymuseum.ie/blog/new-labels-for-visually-impaired-visitors/) and it even gave me the stats for the labels. They are as follows:

Font: Calibri (black on white)

Titles: 36 point

Main Text: 22 point

Spacing: 1.5

Alignment: Left-justified

I think it’s really interesting that they included a lot of information about these packets on their websites. Usually I’d think that these sorts of things would get kinda overlooked. These packets were designed to be large-font and high-contrast. On their site they say that the main reason they started these was because of the low light in the museum making it harder to read. Another cool thing to mention about it is that they made their packets based on the guidelines and advice from the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI).

Okay next one guys. This one I feel becomes a little… I don’t know what the word is, problematic? Inaccessible even??? It seems like it was made with good intentions while also comletely overlooking another demographic. This whole thing really makes me feel like the designers thought a lot more about people with visual impairments rather than people with mobility issues.

There are bumps (of which are pretty big and metallic mind you) in front of the elevators. Now this is cool and all until you’re trying to get to the elevator on your wheelchair and you start shaking around like you’re wheeling over some rocks. Whose idea was this?? I guess it’s fine if you want some speed bumps on your way to the elevator. But there’s really not even enough room in this part of the museum to go very fast (unless you have rockets or something). Maybe this is better than it looks and feels and just is. In my personal opinion, this makes the museum LESS accessible to those with mobility issues but more accessible to those with visual impairments. I have never seen anything like that before. Usually people think more about mobility issues and less about visual ones, if they think of them at all. And I’m pretty sure elevators often have little bumps in front of them anyway? Why are they so big and disruptive? Who is riding on their wheelchair so fast that the museum feels the need to add speed bumps? I would like to meet this person and perhaps get their autograph.

Karah is pictured above for scale on the size of these things (hi Karah!)

There was also this sign at this exhibit! It was so cool to see artifact descriptions in braille. Although this was the only one I could find that was formatted like this. I’m interested to see if this could be implemented more, considering it takes a lot of space. Maybe it won’t need to be, since there’s screen readers and audio guides.

To close off my lovely blog, I’ll show this honorable mention of the braille depicted on the stop button on all the public buses.

Yay accessibility!!!! I’d like to give a huge shout out to all the people out there with visual impairments #hellyeah