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Content

The "Content" aspect of exhibit development is all about intellectual access (the "Can it reach you?" question). As exhibit planners, we think what messages we want to convey, to whom, and how best to do it.

In our experience, the best way to achieve intellectual access to exhibits is to incorporate Universal Design - ie choices - into the development process. It is not possible to make an exhibit that is completely accessible to all visitors, but it is possible to present the exhibit’s main ideas in a variety of ways, so that a wide range of visitors can choose among them and come away having enjoyed themselves and having gotten the main messages. The multisensory, multimodal approaches implicit in choices are integral to the development of universally designed exhibits.

Some examples of access-aware content decisions at the Museum of Science: How we use sound, tactile, smell and visual elements as educational/communicative devices.

One of the most challenging - and most fun - aspects of exhibit planning is thinking of ways to present an exhibit’s main themes in a variety of formats.

Messages

A major theme of the Messages exhibit: "there are many ways to deliver the same message" lends itself to multiple media to convey one message. In "What’s The Message?", the message is "FIRE!!" and the media are a siren, a flashing light and the smell of smoke.

Another Messages theme is "Communication requires sending, receiving and correctly interpreting a message" This is taken up in Language To Go, a diner food ordering activity in which the visitor (the server) has to fill customers’ food orders spoken in their regional accents, and using local names for the menu item.
	What's The Message? Smell it, See it, Hear it	Language To Go - Ordering Dinerfood

Secrets of Aging

In Secrets of Aging, we wanted to express that part of aging is adapting to changes in the world around you. To do this, we used artifacts to show visitors the amount of change that had taken place in just one technology, the telephone, during the lifetime of a 100-year-old. We then added sounds from the phones and imaginary phone conversations to make this component accessible to someone who is blind. The audio addition to this piece became so popular that we eventually had to add scripts of the spoken conversation so that visitors who were hard of hearing would not feel left out. In the final exhibition, we found that these scripts had an even broader use since many parents read them while their children listened to the audio messages.

Another example from the aging exhibit was a component that focused on the changes of the heart with age. Here we provided visitors with the opportunity to listen to the sound of the heartbeat at various stages of life. We enhanced this experience by placing a leather membrane over the speaker so that visitors could also feel the vibrations of the sounds. This made the experience accessible to visitors who could not hear, and more engaging for those who could.

The Observatory

In "The Observatory" visitors practice observation skills in activities based on touch, smell, hearing and vision. Or - they can measure their own hearing range and if they want, compare it with others. In Hot or Cold, they observe that the same surface feels warm to one hand and cold to the other hand, depending on whether the hand has been previously chilled or warmed.
	"Making Sense of your senses" - Multisensory observation activities in "The Observatory"

Investigate!

The skin sensor component in Investigate! was created to allow visitors to use a galvanic skin sensor connected to a computer to investigate skin resistance. As an invitation activity, visitors are asked to try to control their skin resistance by breathing, laughing or just thinking. Visitors place two fingers on the sensor. The resistance is measured and graphical data is displayed on a computer monitor. A sound mechanism can also be used to allow visitors to visualize the graph of their resistance without actually looking at the graph. Visitor studies indicate that many sighted as well as blind visitors use this feature.

Additional data can be collected with the help of challenge cards that ask visitors to design investigations to determine whether certain fragrances or sounds can change skin resistance. Visitors can also create their own investigations using the skin sensor.

An audio label describing the activity and suggesting activities to try accompanies the exhibit.

Bird Hall- Language of the Birds

The focus of "A Birds' World," the new bird hall at the Museum of Science is the study of birds as indicators of predator movement on the landscape. Visitors learn to distinguish bird alarm calls from the call, song or fledgling begging calls that are the baseline sounds of the forest. They then use these calls as indicators of the hidden animals always on the move just out of sight. This basic premise of using bird calls as "predator detectors" is a sound-based approach that works well for blind visitors.

FBI mystery

This component in the bird hall was first prototyped exclusively with blind advisors. The FBI asks you, as a sound specialist, to help them with their toughest cases. Can you listen to the cell phone call of a lost hiker and tell what habitat he’s lost in from the bird calls in the background? Can you listen to a tape of poachers trapping turtles and explain to the FBI that it was the alarm call set off by their agents that tipped the poachers off to the "sting" in progress?

Bird cases

The Hall of Birds which has cases of bird mounts is made accessible through a computer interactive with audio help. Each bird is described, and blind visitors can navigate to the sound files for each species. Here they can listen to the alarm calls of birds that are especially expressive in each of the eight environments common in New England. When they hear these same calls in nature, the pattern of movement of the alarms through the forest can often identify the type of predator causing the disturbance.

Natural Mysteries

Chinese Herbal Shop

Can you identify Chinese medicinal herbs by smell? In this interactive, you’ll learn that and more as you determine the components of a traditional perscription. At the table of an Chinese herbal shop, compare the scents of herbs in jars to the smell of a completed prescription packet. Once you identify each component of the recipe, the audio program will help you determine what ailment the remedy is meant to treat.

The use of sound

Audio explanations, descriptions and instructions are necessary access accommodations for blind or visually impaired visitors. Even if an exhibit is based on sound, touch or smell, audio labels are still needed to provide context and meaning. For example, "Meaning with Music" in Messages, based on the idea that different musical sound tracks can promote different interpretations of the same film segment, is a sound-based activity. But in order to play the game, a visitor who can’t see still needs an audio description of the film segment and instructions on how to proceed (location and function of buttons and other interactive elements). Similarly, the "Language To Go" diner food ordering activity needs a description of the McDonald’s-style "cash register", with its pictorial keys and their location. Without this, the activity, which involves listening to regional names for different foods, would still be inaccessible to blind visitors.

Meaning With Music has audio description of film segments

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Audio tours at the Museum of Science:

The Museum has created a cassette tape audio tour for visually impaired visitors to the Investigate!! exhibit. For Leonardo Da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist, a temporary exhibition in 1997, a random access CD guided tour was produced by Antenna Audio Tours.

Antenna Audio Tours,

PO Box 176,

Sausalito, CA 94966

415/332-4862;

A guided tour and tactile map of the "Messages" exhibit, produced by TouchGraphics, is available at a stationary kiosk at the exhibit entrance.

The following are institutions that we know of, that offer audio tours of portions of their facilities.

• NY Hall of Science: Audio tours are available for the following exhibits: Seeing The Light, Sound Sensations, Hidden Kingdoms - The World of Microbes and Marvelous Molecules. These are designated by a square yellow ear symbol in the Exhibits section. Or, access the information directly from the Museum's homepage. The tours were produced by Acoustiguide.
• Chicago Botanic Gardens: The Buehler Enabling Garden is universally accessible and offers a taped tour which, however, is not mentioned in their website.
• The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center offers a digital random-access tour coupled with the Talking Signs wayfinding system.

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Measurements

Rulers can be made tactile. Digital readouts of temperature or weight can be purchased with speech output. Captek/Science Products Box 888, Southeastern PA 19399 800/888-7401;
	Tactile ruler measures distance on rolldown car track

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Captions and text labels

Making the audible visible - captioning:

All video programs are captioned for visitors with hearing impairments and anyone else who prefers text over audio presentation. In a noisy space, that can be a lot of people!

Text Labels

Some people have difficulty reading and understanding text labels. This could include children just learning to read, non-English speakers, people who became deaf before acquiring English and visitors with certain learning disabilities. We try to keep sentences short, grammar simple and vocabulary commonplace. We have also found that incorporating simple pictures and diagrams into the label text encourages reading and helps understanding. Two examples of this approach are the temperature experiment in Investigate and the instructions in Hot or Cold?, an exhibit component in The Observatory. In Hot or Cold, an exhibit which involves placing one hand on a chilled metal plate and the other on a very warm plate, appropriate use of the exhibit component increased dramatically when simple line drawings of suggested hand placement were added to the label.

Hot Or Cold exhibit component	Hot Or Cold label has drawings and text	Drawings and text explain the Temperature Investigation activity in "Investigate!"

Braille - to use or not to use

There is general agreement among blind advisors that if you are going to provide a single print alternative, then audio is preferable to braille, because only a small proportion (<10%) of blind people read braille, and because audio benefits more than visually impaired people (a Universal Design consideration). However, having said that, those people who do read braille really find it useful and would like to have it as an option on exhibit components. They make the point that as a low cost auxiliary accommodation, braille helps them greatly and braille labels make an important statement to sighted visitors, about the Museum’s commitment to inclusion

Developing inclusive exhibits is an ongoing learning process. We learn from our successes and from our failures. Here are some things we’ve learned about universal exhibit design:

We have learned that everyone loves to smell things and pet a beaver or bear mount.

Bear mount		Beaver mount

And audio labels benefit more than visitors who are blind: Young children and in fact, most people prefer to hear labels rather than read them. We’ve learned that if an exhibit is potentially accessible to blind visitors, (ie smell, touch, or sound-based,) it also needs an audio label if it is to be accessible to someone who can’t see. Consistency is also important. For example, we routinely use one inch square buttons to activate audio labels. While consistency is necessary for visitors with visual or cognitive impairments, everyone benefits from it. Finally, we’ve learned to make informed and considered decisions as we develop an exhibit. This means that in some cases, we choose to sacrifice a degree of one kind of accessibility to accommodate other needs — for example, addressing a maintenance problem or lowering an exhibit component for very young children.

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