Blind & Deaf Groups
Hi Henry,
We have done a few things with blind and deaf visitors. Since we are primarily focused on guided tours, we have a script of the tour available for deaf guests (as well as scripts in other languages for international visitors.) We also go out of our way to ensure we point out item descriptions and other notes of interest. At times, we will schedule a deaf group separately to show them more attention or allow extra time to produce written descriptions.
For blind visitors, we set up private tours with our curator and we allow, what we refer to as touching tours,. We allow the visitor to feel items from our collection that are normally only handled by our staff. We used to give "white glove tours" (we would give out white cotton gloves during touching tours) but after surveying blind groups, we found that blind individuals had a hard time feeling the details of the object through the gloves, so after much discussion and compromise, the curator allowed open touching with his supervision.
I hope this helps,
John
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