Exploring Accessibility to Cultural Heritage

The outcomes shown in the presentation above are the result of field research, meeting experts and sharing expertise. This also allowed us to create significant relationships that have enriched the whole school community and that we hope will lead to future collaborations and projects.

Here below you can read about:

1. a seminar held by Dr. Vincenza Ferrara, coordinator of Visual Thinking Strategies, Italy

2. a workshop held by Mrs Eleonora Borromeo, English teacher and typhlologist

3. a meeting with Mrs Maria Mencarini, President of the of the Pesaro-Urbino department of the Italian Union of the Blind and Partially Sighted

4. a field visit to the Anteros Tactile Museum in Bologna

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)

During our  afternoon lessons, we also talked about ways to make art more accessible and interesting to all kinds of people, for example children or teenagers or anyone who thinks museums are not fun or worth to visit. 

We organized a meeting with Dr. Vincenza Ferrara about VTS, she explained to us how this idea of living a museum was created and how it is used to get more people visiting museums and allow them not just to watch but interact, "play" with art in an unusual way and indirectly learn something new. Dr. Ferrara let us experiment Visual Thinking Strategies and everyone had the possibility to interact, confront ideas and come up with a description and diversity of points of view about the work of art. 

VIP workshop

During our lessons we talked about how art should be accessible to every one, included VIPs .... but who are VIPs? This acronym stands for Visiually Impared People and it means that a person's eyesight cannot be correcter to a "normal" level. Vision Impairment may be caused by a loss of visual acuity, where the eye doesn't see objects as clearly as usual and the use of glasses or supplements are required. In order to allow them to fully appreciate works of art we should think about ways to make panels with bigger font descriptions so that people with a lower sight can read better but also panels in Braille for blind people. While doing that we should not forget deaf people and so provide museum with vocal guides and art descriptions in multiple languages too.  That's why with the help of the teachers we started to focus on Braille writing, techniques for making relief pictures and tools like that.   

Experiencing Braille reading and writing, trying to draw without seeing or touching a bas-relief without looking at it allowed us to experience what it is like to be in someone else's shoes, feel connected to people in a specific situation. This helped us figure out some of the problems they might run into and also to discover some solutions. 

Meeting Unione Ciechi

As a follow-up to these two lessons, we organized a meeting with the Unioni Ciechi di Pesaro. We set up a room with chairs in a circle and all the classes from Year 3 and 4 International course gathered together to welcome and listen to Maria Mencarini president of Uci Psaro.

 Since she is blind she explained to us about her experience in museums, what she found that helped her and what she would have like to find in order to have a visit around the works of art in a comfy and smooth way. She told us how much important it is to have panels in Braille, clean and new to read easily; we think it was very useful because having no idea of how it actually is to just have to immagine things without seing  them is so much more difficult that watch them with our eyes. So the past experience with the VIPs workshop and the meeting with the Unioni Ciechi made more clearer in our mind what we needed to do to help the museums make art accessible to a lager group of people, children, teenagers, adults but also VIPS. Because every one has the right to fully appreciate all works of art.  

Antheros Museum

On the 17th of March all the classes from the International corse left Pesaro in the early morning to go to Bologna to the Museum Antheros. Once we got there they greeted us in a room with some bas-relief exposed of famous paintings. They illustrated to us the meaning and why they created them. They told us that first it was a school for VIPS and when they were finally accepted in all the schools the Museum had to be reinvented. That's why it was transformed into a school and a museum where VIPS have the chance to study works of art, experience depth, volumes and shapes touching bas- relief completly built by the staff of the museum. This proces of teaching visual principles and elements take a lot of time of course for blind people but a qualified staff is there to help and transform all of this in a fun and interesting journey. After the intro we splet in two groups and the first one headed to a room full of bas-relief of various painting mostrly from Renaissance. Because they are the best works where recognizable shape are drown. Cause imagine having to picture in our head with closed eyes abstract forms? It would be almost impossible...

The second group went in a room where the staff makes, mantains and repairs the bas-reliefs; they talked to us about the whole project (start-finish) and then we went to the workshop where blind people perfection their art appreciation skills by using clay. We learnt that they start with basic things such as squares and shapes, than they grow level after lever until they reach the point of being able to actually realise the bas-relief of the painting that they have studied in clay . We never thought something like that could be possible but the work they do is absolutely remarkable. The guides then led us in a workshop. We sat around a table blindfolded and each of us had a piece of clay and we had to make something in ten minutes; then we passed our work to the person on the right keeping our eyes closed and we tried to describe and guess without looking. It was really hard, because everyone imagined something completely different, it was a unique experience that made us think about how using precise language for description is of extreme importance in all communication.

Planning our accessibility toolkits

Following all these activities we started to think what WE could develop in order to make our selected artworks more accessible and easier to enjoy by everyone, from people with physical or mental disabilities to those who don't really like museums or are not usually interested in Art.

Click here to visit the project website

The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.