Accessible exhibition guides, creating an equal and enjoyable experience for our gallery spaces
Over the last two years, Wellcome Collection has been working on creating a consistent and enjoyable experience, no matter how someone may interact with us, whether that is online or in person.
This journey has not been linear, taking some twists and turns along the way. Four different teams, several ways of working, creating one product, with many stakeholders, offering an equitable experience across all touch points, is quite a challenge.
This is the story of how we found ourselves where we are today, having launched the Wellcome Collection exhibition guides in time for our most recent exhibition. The exhibition guides are an accessibility first, curatorial tour accompanying our latest exhibition “In plain sight” which is available to everyone on personal devices.
Our solution is by no means perfect, but it’s a first step towards a more finely tuned product. We need the voices of those who use accessibility tools to help shape what this looks like in the future. So if you are one of the people who has a keen interest in detail and can collaborate to make improvements, feel free to take a look at the exhibition guides and contact us with your thoughts of how you find the experience.
Ever changing environments
Something that stands out to me after this project, is that digital software development is luxurious. It is possible to create anything with a little time and expertise. When you have an older, more established physical space, that flexibility, iterative change or transformation takes time and planning.
It requires collaboration from teams throughout an organisation to come together to tie language, strategy, content, process, technology and programming into one service. So that is exactly what happened, enabling us to provide the most diverse user experience possible. We hope to offer a stress free, interactive, in gallery experience, that is as accessible as the WellcomeCollection.org website.
The previously available tours were offered on third party hand held devices borrowed from the gallery. With Covid and the cognitive load for visitors caused by memorising a multitude of device types, the team were compelled to think about how consistency and experience could be improved.
The temporary exhibitions at Wellcome are ever changing, with different teams taking on the curation, design and content. These changing roles caused learning to be lost around digital guides and devices and each new exhibition cycle brought different challenges, designs and ultimately a different offer presented to visitors.
Removing dependencies
We knew that uploading and maintaining content was time consuming, having to be completed via a third party. Depending on a third party to supply the handsets created complexity. Different handsets were required to deliver the guides in our various galleries. Removing the third party dependency as the primary organisational goal offered us focus of which to think about the technical solution.
By considering the current Wellcome Collection CMS as a way of servicing the content side of the guides, we could reduce costs, maintenance time and ensure that the guides are kept up to date.
Searching for truth
Nelly Ekstrom, a colleague in exhibitions, who had worked in the visitor experience team for 4.5 years had a wealth of information about Wellcome visitors. With her help, I began to learn about their needs, frustrations, confusions and hopes.
Using Nelly’s knowledge and a combination of workshops we encouraged interdepartmental collaboration. Starting with an inception session including stakeholders from different parts of Wellcome Collection to identify outcomes, risks and expectations. This approach ensured that we had a shared a group understanding of the problem space, outcomes and challenges.
Finding focus
Our work with stakeholders identified that the scope of the project had become too broad. Significant effort was required to shape the first iteration.
Journey maps, empathy maps and personas helped frame our users and their interactions. By focussing on the objective of “ensuring everyone’s, specifically D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people’s visit to the Wellcome Building, is enjoyable and inclusive”. It became clear that disabled visitors who visited the venue and visitors who used accessibility tools were our highest priority.
With this group we started out with diary studies and focus groups to hear about the current visitor experience. Providing the team with a place to start to think about how we might improve these experiences.
Social media, communities of interest and our user research panel became invaluable sources of information. A key piece of information I needed, was to understand the experience, that a blind person has within an exhibition space. Understanding the complexities of watching a BSL video and looking at an object at the same time was also important along with many other nuances of visiting an museum and gallery.
We heard from people who wanted audio content, and those who didn’t. Some who wanted gallery provided handsets and some who wanted to use their highly customised personal device. We heard about sensory overload and setting off gallery alarms. People spoke of their anxiety about gallery spaces and how they annoyed other people enjoying the exhibitions. Some wanted to read information, and some needed seats to be able to watch the BSL videos.
One size fits all, or does it?
As knowledge was synthesised, it became infinitely clear that our solution had to be as diverse as our visitors. Just producing an audio guide was not going to offer the experience needed to enjoy the gallery and exhibition spaces. We had to approach this with a much broader view of needs.
Our approach also needed to be holistic and take into account every place in which someone would come into contact with Wellcome Collection, consider our messaging, content, user journeys, interactions, signage, language choices, design consistency and much more.
Building in repeatability
The curatorial and the digital engagement worlds had to blend together to develop language around our offer and how we communicated online and in gallery. Help came in the form of Tourettes Hero, who worked with us to understand our language, create signposting and guidelines for language use across the board.
The development team mapped out data models, identifying places in which information already used on the site could be automated into the guides. By pulling in exhibition titles and descriptions automatically duplicated content within the CMS could be avoided, in turn reducing time taken for the content team to enter extra text.
A template was created within Prismic our headless content management system which is then associated with an exhibition. This template provides fields for editorial to enter all of the media and the content for each item featured in the exhibition. These fields are automatically rendered into the correct places within the exhibition guides and will work for every new exhibition created.
Outcomes
The first iteration of the final product offers the user three ways to interact with the guides, audio, BSL, Captions and images. It encompasses tactile flooring to lead blind or visually impaired visitors through the gallery space. The flooring changes texture when the visitor arrives at a stop in the guide, allowing them to use a personal device to scan a QR code.
The codes are positioned consistently on tactile signage with numbering and braille. By scanning a QR code the tour will automatically open at the correct audio guide stop. If a visitor wishes to change the way in which they wish to receive the guide content, they can choose either BSL or Captions and transcripts through the website. A cookie will remember this choice and subsequent barcode scans will open the exhibition guides up in the preferred version automatically.
The guides also offer the user the ability to zoom into images of the items used in the exhibition.
By designing the guides to be built on existing Wellcome Collection infrastructure, the organisation has taken maintenance and updating in house. The editorial team are able to make changes to the wording or gallery information whenever they need, with as little effort as possible. There is no longer a third party dependency or time delay in altering or updating the content within the guides. New guides for new exhibitions can be created in exactly the same format with easy to use Prismic templates.
Collaboration is key
This work required strong collaboration to ensure that every nuance of the guides was considered, each team held key information based on their area of expertise. By working together to review the needs of the users, develop a content strategy, outline timelines and add their own flare to solving problems, the results have been fantastic.
Some key things ensured that the guides would be delivered in time for the gallery opening. Production time lines were discussed early and by defining the structure of the guides from a technical perspective, the curatorial team could ensure the necessary content to fit this framework would be ready for launch.
The attention to detail from the exhibitions team with signage and tactile floor tape provides an end to end service. Offering the physical space the same level of accessibility as the website.
The view for the future is to produce a similar guide for our temporary exhibitions, developing the offer for further areas of the organisation and to use the influence of our visitors to improve on the work we have already completed.
