June 24: Symposium & Workshop for Inclusive Museum Experience

A Symposium on the Workshop on Inclusive Co-Creation of Audio Description With Museum Visitors Who Are Blind, Partially-blind, and Sighted at UMMA.

Saturday, June 24, 2023, University of Michigan Museum of Art:  8:00 – 10:30 am

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 art within its spaces, including reading contextual information about each piece on the placards positioned nearby. 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, for instance, are marginalized from these cultural experiences though they have a legal right to access and experience them. While the conversation around the uses of audio description started decades ago (Synder 2005), in recent years, it has emerged as a viable way to facilitate blind and partially blind museum visitors experiencing museum artwork through oral descriptions of them facilitated via virtual and in-person experiences (Eardley et al. 2017; Anagnostakis et al. 2016), particularly during the Covid age of social distancing. However, in those conversations, audio descriptions are typically created solely by museum professionals, without input from visitors who are blind and partially blind. Join us for a symposium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art to launch a generative co-creation of audio description educational program that brings together museum professionals with community members to co-create audio descriptions of select artwork from UMMA’s collection.

A panel with experts from museum and disability studies, the fine arts, and audio description, moderated by Audrey Bennett.