ADA Accommodations

[hnauman]

I have been doing research on ADA law and I want to find out what other museum have done to accommodate deaf and/or blind individuals. We already have assisted listening devices for the hard-of-hearing for our television display units. We will be having a deaf school group come through to help us with what we can do to make their experience more enjoyable.

We want to help blind guests in our building as well. Does anyone have any knowledge on Braille literature or Braille signage? Also, if anyone has any information on special admission rates for handicapped individuals, please advise.

Thanks,
Henry

[JMOrr]

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