Often accessibility is an afterthought or sticking plaster to fix the holes in an experience that was designed with a central audience in mind: maybe middle-aged, fully able, well educated. Ideally, we would have user experiences designed specifically for different kinds of modalities and in different styles, not just because of the wide diversity of users, but also because any one user has varying needs and varying abilities at different times. In the context of a large museum or cultural institution this is already challenging, but appears impossible for smaller archives, or local community heritage. Yet if heritage and history is to be accessible this also applies to production: democratising digitisation and empowering marginalised groups. We need appropriate architectures, tools, technology, infrastructure and platforms, so that this is not just possible, but simple. In this talk I offer some insights, some examples and many research challenges towards the goal of enabling exceptional experiences for everyone.
Figure 1, (left) shows Frasan [
How could this be made more accessible? There are easy fixes, such as adding alt tags describing each image. However, the selection of items that are included in the application was based largely on their visual interest. This selection would have been very different if chosen focused on the most interesting to read. That is, we risk taking an experience optimised for the sighted and then modifying it to produce a poor alternative.
The map navigation is more complicated, perhaps there ought to be a completely different mode of menu navigation with a 'near by' option and structural navigation for exploring geographically based on the township areas of the island. This already begins to feel like a different application; does that matter?
Of course, accessibility is not just about visual impairments. Many recent interface trends,
especially for mobile-phone apps, require high precision of touch-points and then combine this
with poor feedback about what has happened. Together, these effectively shut out the elderly, or
those less confident or physically able. Elsewhere I've argued that we need more ‘nasal’
interaction styles, ones that embody history and even more command-line or dialogue-like
alternatives [
In an ideal world, maybe we would have different interface styles optimised for different physical and cognitive abilities as well as different age groups, social groups, and special occasions. Of course, even the same person with the same abilities may want to experience the same underlying material differently, if they are tired, injured, or simply would like another viewpoint. Furthermore, these should be interconnected, so that someone taking a largely visual tour would be able to talk about it to someone taking a more auditory or tactile visit, or parents sharing with children even when viewing different detailed material.
This sounds like a tall order, but twenty years ago, the Equator project explored shared
physical and virtual visits to the Mackintosh Interpretation Centre in the Lighthouse, Glasgow [
One way to cut this apparent Gordian Knot is through open infrastructure and tools to enable more easy capture, curation and authoring of both archive materials and the ways to experience them.
Many (so called) content management systems conflate the management of content itself with
the means of reading or viewing it, for example, WordPress, used in more than 40% of all websites
[
Of course, even with this back-end, Frasan only had one– visually based – interaction style. We
need easy-to-use tools to allow the creation and maintenance of different front-end experiences.
There are good examples of such systems, for example, Placebooks [
Creating alternative experiences is tough enough given the resources of a national museum, but it seems impossible for smaller projects, where even creating one good enough experience is hard given the budgetary and time constraints. Furthermore, for community heritage, there maybe limited technical expertise. Accessibility is often seen primarily in terms of consumption, butthis implicitly assumes that only those with existing power, privilege and wealth can have a say. If we want to claim truly accessible heritage, this has to include openness to those creating material as well as those receiving it.
In previous publications, we refer to ‘democratising digitisation’ [
In various projects, we have observed how the individuals and communities we work with
have their own ways of storing and sharing materials, typically using off-the-shelf applications
and services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, spreadsheets or Facebook pages. Ideally, we try to
work with the data as it is with minimal changes, rather than demanding they change; privileging
their ownership; a principle we call “the leaves are golden” [
On the capture side, it is always evident that as soon as a community member turns the page
in an album or opens a digital photograph, they begin to talk, to tell stories, to point out people
and places. As a way to make this easier to capture we created a small application TalkOver [
Often, we want to connect digital content to physical locations, either within museums or
outdoors and there are many technologies to enable this [
In a recent deployment at Troedrhiwfuwch [18], we have used QR codes, but with a small twist.
Rather than directly linking to a web page, the QR code links through a lightweight web
middleware using a unique id, rather like URL shorteners such as TinyUrl (see Figure 2). A Google
Doc spreadsheet allows easy (re)configuration of the final destination URL, but also allows
alternative options, rather in the way early pre-web HyperText systems allowed one-to-many
links [
Instead of creating second-rate experiences for those not in the central target group, we ideally want to create multiple ways to access local heritage, cultural sites and museums that offer different modalities and styles suitable for diverse people and personal contexts. However, this is not easy for small archives or local heritage projects when budgets are small and expertise fragmentary. We desperately need tools, technology and infrastructure that allow people to work with the materials they have, using methods they are comfortable with, to create diverse and rich experiences for others.
We’ve seen some examples that are small steps in this direction, including clear separation between data collection and curation at the back-end and the threading of this into front-end experiences. However, there is lots of work to do and lots of opportunity for innovative and impactful research; so that we can indeed create exceptional experiences for everyone.
For more about this work see: https://alandix.com/academic/talks/AMID2023-exceptional/
This paper draws on work funded through Cherish-DE (EPSRC, EP/M022722/1) and InterMusE (AHRC UK–US New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions, AH/V009664/1). [16] MonmouthpediA: What is MonmouthpediA? 2023,
URL: https://monmouthpedia.wordpress.com [17] L. Tedd, People’s Collection Wales: Online access to the heritage of Wales from museums, archives and libraries. Program 45,3 (2011):333–345 [18] Troedrhiwfuwch online, 2023,
Village and history URL: https://whereweare.org/troedrhiwfuwch/
Research projects URL: https://digitaleconomy.wales/troedrhiwfuwch/ [19] J. Van Zundert, On not writing a review about Mirador: Mirador, IIIF, and the epistemological gains of distributed digital scholarly resources. Digital Medievalist 11.1 (2018):5. doi:10.16995/dm.78 [20] N. Yankelovich, B. Haan, N. Meyrowitz, S. Drucker, Intermedia: the concept and the construction of a seamless information environment. Computer 21.1 (1988):81–96. doi:10.1109/2.222120