FEATURE Subtle Touch

By Erik Lambertson Corporate Communications Manager

Alethea Moroney, student, and Daphne Hitchcock, local braille teacher, reading one of the braille panels in the Orcas exhibition.

S U B T L E T O U C H

Braille and other improvements to accessibility in the exhibitions

Visitors to the Royal BC Museum during the COVID-19 pandemic have become used to following directional signs, wearing masks and relying on tools like styluses to animate touchscreens.

But one element of the Orcas: Our Shared Future exhibition demands touch—the braille panels that line the walls.

Accessibility, along with equity, diversity and inclusion, is a priority for the Royal BC Museum. In recent years, the museum has worked hard to ensure that it provides its visitors with equitable access, no matter where they come from or what challenges they face—and a 60-year-old building certainly comes with its fair share of challenges to physical accessibility. (continues next page)

There’s still a lot of work to be done regarding accessibility at the Royal BC Museum… As an institution, we should be integrating all the principles of Universal Design, creating an environment that can be used by everybody, regardless of their ability, size or age.

—Steve Lewis, Exhibition Designer

Happily, we’re on the cusp of change with the museum modernization project. In the meantime, we do our best to stay nimble and responsive. To figure out how to improve accessibility for people with physical disabilities, we asked the Rick Hansen Foundation to take a look at our galleries in 2017. Among many upgrades we made in response to their feedback was installing a wheelchair lift in the Old Town display, providing access to the second floor for visitors for whom stairs are not an option.

Just as importantly, we ensured we’d consider accessibility for new temporary spaces.

Every time we present a new feature exhibition, we completely reconfigure the exhibition space. The Exhibitions team ensures each new exhibition offers ample room to turn around in a wheelchair, thinks about the most appropriate lighting for people with different needs, and considers the optimal height (or angle) for material displayed on walls or inside cases.

Staff in the Exhibitions team field-tested the use of braille, for people who are blind or have very low vision, in the 2019 Maya exhibition. That year Daphne Hitchcock, a local teacher of blind students, was visiting the exhibition when she noticed the braille panels were mismatched.

“I thought, ‘gosh: it’s talking about a vase, but it’s a statue head!’” She let the Exhibitions team know, and they jumped on correcting the errors. “I was impressed that the museum was so quick to respond,” she says.

Happily for the Royal BC Museum, Daphne continued her conversation with us about braille and became an indispensable resource during the creation of the Orcas exhibition. Not only did Daphne proofread braille on behalf of the museum, she helped educate staff. Steve Lewis, exhibition designer, says, “She was extremely helpful in working with us, and the panel

(left) Alethea Moroney touching the orca and human brain replicas in Orcas.

(right) Braille wall panel featured in Orcas.

(below) Accessibility advocate Tara Moss in the glass lobby. Photograph courtesy of Berndt Sellheim.

fabricators, to make sure we were all talking the same ‘language’ and things were being done to the correct standards.”

“I always think of the museum as being an extension of the classroom,” Daphne says. “So to have these accessibility pieces is really important.”

We agree.

This year, we invited educator, accessibility advocate and author Tara Moss to provide us with feedback on the Orcas exhibition. Tara uses a wheelchair (in fact, one of the coolest wheelchairs we’ve ever seen, with calavera-inspired hubs) and we wanted to know if the exhibition was accessible. (Spoiler alert: it was!)

And during National AccessAbility Week, we partnered with Tara, Community Living BC and the Canucks Autism Network for a Learning event called Accessibility in the GLAM Sector: A Virtual Panel. Our aim was to continue the discussion about equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility within the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done regarding accessibility at the Royal BC Museum,” says Steve Lewis. “As an institution, we should be integrating all the principles of Universal Design, creating an environment that can be used by everybody, regardless of their ability, size or age. We still have a lot of work to do in order to reach those levels, but it’s something we’re conscious of and are trying to incorporate into our designs as much as possible.”

The museum’s Exhibitions and Property Management teams can’t bear the burden of making the museum a more accessible environment alone. The museum also thrives online and through live programming, and we must also consider the challenges and opportunities of accessibility in those areas. Recently the museum begun describing images and video content on social media, an act that now feels as natural as using a hashtag.

It’ll take all of us at the museum to ensure accessibility is a given. And it’ll start with listening carefully to the needs of all of our communities, something we’re doing as we modernize our organization.

To learn more about braille, visit brailleliteracycanada.ca/en. To learn more about Universal Design, visit universaldesign.ie.