'I don't see what you mean': Broadening participation through co-created inclusive digital museum audio

FAIN: HND-284966-22

Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1015)
Audrey G. Bennett (Project Director: July 2021 to present)

Participating institutions:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI) - Applicant/Recipient
University of Westminster (London) - Participating Institution

The development and testing of a one-day workshop for museum practitioners that will use the Inclusive Co-Created Audio Description model to change how museum workers understand and implement digital accessibility for blind, partially blind, and sighted audiences. The UK partner, the University of Westminster, is requesting £58,525 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

This project sits within the NEH/AHRC theme: Evolving institutions to face the 21st Century, and aims to develop and rigorously evaluate a 1-day Workshop for Inclusive Co-created Audio Description (WICAD) model, working with diverse blind, partially-blind, and sighted audiences in the UK and US to: 1) Provide museum practitioners with a robust model through which they can enrich and extend their digital provision to engage traditionally marginalized audiences. 2) Improve visitor-facing experiences of online access to a diverse range of artworks for all museum visitors to foster digitally-enabled equitable participation To achieve these goals, we will compare the experiences of experienced and novice museum-goers to address these central questions: 1. What level of guidance do co-creation groups need to produce a draft audio description (AD) within a 1-day workshop? 2. How do groups choose to incorporate different voices, positionality, and identities within a co-created AD?

Associated Products

Broadening participation through co-created inclusive museum audio interpretation (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Broadening participation through co-created inclusive museum audio interpretation
Author: Audrey G. Bennett
Author: Allison Eardley
Author: Vanessa Jones
Abstract: If the Covid pandemic has shown the museum sector anything, it is the need for digital access. Within this sector, one of the leaders is Smartify, a website that facilitates remote interaction with over 2 million works of art, of which very few are audio-described. For blind or partially blind (BPB) visitors, the provision of recorded audio description (AD) is essential to experiencing museum collection because AD provides oral summaries of artwork typically accessed solely through vision. However, only 5% of museums in the UK mention an AD provision on their websites; yet, both the UK and the US have equitable access to culture enshrined in law. We will present a new model for co-created inclusive AD, piloted at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (US) and Watts Gallery (UK). The creative process was led by partially blind participants working with blind and non-blind collaborators. Our model challenges current AD practice, which relies on sighted curators and docents producing AD for BPB visitors. It reflects professional guidelines for using subjectivity, positionality, interactivity, and intersectionality in inclusive audio interpretation, based on audience experience and the respective roles of aesthetics, interpretation, and multimodality in the cross-cultural communication of art with diverse museum visitors. In our panel presentation, we will discuss the development of the Workshop for Inclusive Co-created Audio description (W-ICAD) model. This model is underpinned by the three axioms of Blindness Gain (Thompson, 2017); 1) BPB people benefit from access to a multisensory way of being that stimulates inventiveness, imagination, and creativity, 2) non-visual living is an art and 3) accessible approaches developed by and for blind people can benefit non-blind people. This model has looked at how AD can be enriched by novel ways of experiencing paintings that rethink traditionally ‘sighted’ ways of appreciating art and the renewal of the neglected art of
Date: 07/13/2022
Primary URL: http://visitorstudies.org/conference/past-conferences
Primary URL Description: This is the URL for past conferences of the annual Visitor Studies Association conference.
Conference Name: VSA 2022 Conference: Creating Space and Coming Together

Towards the design of a cross-cultural museum experience for all visitors: Findings from a community-engaged transdisciplinary design education research project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Towards the design of a cross-cultural museum experience for all visitors: Findings from a community-engaged transdisciplinary design education research project
Author: Audrey G. Bennett
Author: Nicholas Lamarca
Abstract: In 2018, curators Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps collaborated with a multidisciplinary team of stakeholders to design a multisensory exhibition titled "Senses: Design Beyond Vision" at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design. The exhibition responded to a clarion call for museums to be more inclusive. The show highlighted the work of designers creating at the intersection of inclusivity and accessibility. The exhibit facilitated direct and exploratory engagement by visitors with novel multisensory objects and experiences that engaged visitors' other organ senses beyond vision. Nevertheless, since then, millions of artworks in museum collections worldwide remain mostly inaccessible to culturally diverse audiences, ranging from blind and partially blind to those who are otherwise marginalized. A framed painting that hangs on the wall of a museum with a concisely written placard attached to the wall next to it is the traditional approach to presenting this type of two-dimensional artwork. However, artwork presented in this traditional manner is designed to privilege museum visitors who are non-blind or fully sighted. How can we re-design the experience of engaging with a painting in a museum to be more inclusive for cross-cultural communication and broader impact? How can museum experiences be inclusive of a more diverse audience that includes people who are blind and partially blind? A transdisciplinary team of researchers from the disciplines of art and design, psychology, and museum education collaborated to address these questions among others. The perspectives discussed in this paper are from the art and design professionals–a design educator and graduate student of fine art and research assistant. Informed by qualitative research conducted at the Smithsonian Institution, they propose a speculative blueprint or re-design of the viewing of the painted portrait of George Washington Carver and other static portraits at the National Portrait Gallery to commu
Date: 10/20/2022
Primary URL: http://educators.aiga.org/2022-dec-mini-conference-surface/
Primary URL Description: This is the URL for the conference.
Secondary URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRvSZXg-nhU
Secondary URL Description: This the URL for the YouTube channel for the conference with our recorded presentation.
Conference Name: SURFACE: A mini-conference of the 2022 AIGA National Conference

I See What You Are Saying: Broadening Participation Through Co-created Inclusive Audio Description (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: I See What You Are Saying: Broadening Participation Through Co-created Inclusive Audio Description
Abstract: For generations, large swaths of the population have been excluded from experiencing exhibitions at art museums. Those who are sighted have the privilege of visiting museums and engaging with the artwork exhibited within its spaces, including reading contextual information about each piece on the nearby placards. Museums have assumed that it is acceptable to make sight compulsory to engage with art and that sight alone is sufficient. However, those who are blind and partially blind have been mostly marginalized from these cultural experiences though they have a legal right to access and experience them. In recent years, audio description has emerged to facilitate blind and partially blind museum visitors’ experiencing artwork through oral descriptions of them. However, these audio descriptions are typically created solely by museum professionals, with or without input from visitors, particularly those who are blind and partially blind. In this presentation, I argue that audio descriptions that are co-created with visitors who are blind, partially blind, and sighted are more inclusive and broaden participation cross-culturally. I base this argument on evidence gathered from recent workshops on the inclusive co-creation of audio description conducted at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 2022 and at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art in 2023.
Author: Audrey G. Bennett
Date: 12/08/2023
Location: Virtually via Zoom from Ann Arbor, Michigan
Primary URL: http://www.audreygbennett.com/upcoming-talks/coforma-brown-bag-talk
Primary URL Description: This is the URL for the my website where I announce this upcoming public talk.
Secondary URL: http://coforma.io/about
Secondary URL Description: This is the URL for the company that invited me to present this research project after providing a gift to support the recruitment of participants in the second phase to analyze the audience descriptions of the artwork from the Smithsonian Institution.

A Symposium on the Workshop on Inclusive Co-Creation of Audio Description With Museum Visitors Who Are Blind, Partially-blind, and Sighted (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: A Symposium on the Workshop on Inclusive Co-Creation of Audio Description With Museum Visitors Who Are Blind, Partially-blind, and Sighted
Abstract: A Symposium to Launch the Workshop on the Inclusive Co-Creation of Audio Description (WICAD) including: 8-10:30 am A panel discussion with experts from museum and disability studies, the fine arts, and audio description, moderated by Audrey Bennett 11a.m. - 4 p.m. WICAD session with blind, partially-blind, and sighted participants (invite only)
Author: Audrey G Bennett
Date: 06/24/2023
Location: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor

W-iCAD (Web Resource)
Title: W-iCAD
Author: Audrey G. Bennett
Abstract: This webpage for the W-iCAD model is openly accessible through the World Wide Web. It includes a brief overview of the challenge museums face in making their spaces inclusive of visitors who are blind or partially blind and introduces W-iCAD as a way to address this challenge. It provides open access to recordings from the inaugural W-iCAD session at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery and the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). It includes a link for interested stakeholders to read a white paper on W-iCAD--also openly accessible via an openly accessible webpage in a paywalled area of the PI's website that requires membership, but membership is free.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: http://https://www.audreygbennett.com/baohouse/wicad

Broadening Participation in the Museum Experience Through Interactive Aesthetics: Enabling Access to Pluripositionality in the Inclusive Co-Creation and Dissemination of Audio Descriptions (Article)
Title: Broadening Participation in the Museum Experience Through Interactive Aesthetics: Enabling Access to Pluripositionality in the Inclusive Co-Creation and Dissemination of Audio Descriptions
Author: Audrey G. Bennett
Author: Nicholas La Marca
Author: Caitlin Dyche
Abstract: For generations, large swaths of the population, including those who are blind and partially blind, have been mostly marginalized from experiencing visual art at museums. In recent years, audio description (AD) has emerged to facilitate those individuals’ experience of museum artwork. However, such ADs are typically created solely by museum professionals, mostly without input from visitors. Thus, a team of multidisciplinary scholars and museum professionals investigated the development of AD collaboratively by museum professionals and visitors through a workshop at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. A team comprising visitors who are blind, partially blind, and sighted along with museum professionals experienced the George Washington Carver portrait by the artist Betsy Graves Reyneau toward the development of AD. Subsequently, the museum professionals evaluated the workshop’s outcomes—four ADs from four different positionalities—virtually with English-speaking museum visitors. This research revealed that museum visitors who are blind, partially blind, and sighted can experience museum art meaningfully through a workshop on the inclusive co-creation of AD. We found that museum visitors prefer culturally diverse perspectives and contributions from lay and professional observers, a mixture we refer to as “pluripositional.” We also found that the museum visitors enjoyed simultaneous listening to AD of artwork when viewing the artwork in a web-based experience. These findings support the need for multimodal (digital and analog) museum experiences that engage blind, partially blind, and sighted museum visitors in the inclusive co-creation of ADs of artwork accompanied by open access to their pluripositional outcomes.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/v17i02/217-233
Primary URL Description: This URL is the webpage that provides open access to the journal article. Click on Download in the upper right to gain free access to the article.
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: International Journal of the Inclusive Museum
Publisher: Common Ground: International Journal of the Inclusive Museum

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