BYOAD: Customize Content Accessibility Settings: Overview
Team
Students: Caitlin, Liz, and Lynda
Project Overview
In this project, we ask ourselves, “Who is this content designed for? What assumptions are we making about them? Their language, education, and background? Their visual, auditory, cognitive, and reading abilities?” When our exhibits include verbal content, whether it is a text-based description, audio guide, or video, we want all visitors to be able to access, understand, appreciate, and learn from them. We want all visitors to feel like this content was designed with them in mind — because it was.
To this end, we created a digital guidebook titled UCD Toolkit: Universal Content Design Guidelines for Museums and Historic Sites. The toolkit describes three critical aspects of content accessibility: plain language and readability, audio descriptions, and translations.
We designed this toolkit to help sites create and provide visitors with different options to access their exhibit content. The toolkit consolidates useful information into a modular, flexible format, and we highlighted recommendations for sites working with limited resources. We hope this will enable all sites to integrate the accessibility recommendations into their workflows.
OUR GOAL
Our goal was to help cultural sites of varying size and resources to expand and enhance their accessible content options. By providing multiple accessible versions of content enables more visitors to access, understand, appreciate, and learn the same information from exhibit content regardless of differences in language or visual, auditory, or cognitive abilities.
We also hoped to support the normalization of accessible design practices at museums and cultural sites regardless of their available resources.
DELIVERABLES
Our final prototype, the UCD Toolkit: Universal Content Design Guidelines for Museums and Historic Sites available at ucdmuseums.wordpress.com.
This online guidebook includes documentation on content accessibility, plain language and readability, audio descriptions, and translations. In each section, you will learn what the content variation is, why it’s important, and how to integrate the feature into content design process, including best practices and recommended tools and services. This guide also describes and illustrates some examples of exhibit content with many different content options and what that experience might look like to a visitor. Using the feedback from the final presentation, we also added a guide to setting up and working with an access advisory group.