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Evaluation

Why Evaluate for Access ?

When you evaluate for access, you are determining whether your exhibits are meaningful, enjoyable and inclusive. You won’t be able to determine this by simply comparing the exhibit design to measurements specified for illumination, vertical and horizontal reach distances, under-counter knee clearances, pathways etc. Your access evaluation must also include testing out ideas and designs, with many visitors with a variety of different abilities and disabilities. In fact, as valuable as it is to evaluate exhibit ideas and components with our general audience, we find it even more important to test components with visitors whose needs we do not have intimate knowledge of. This is where we find the skills of an evaluator to be very helpful. Often, solutions and ideas that we thought would increase the access of a component or exhibit actually made it more difficult for people to interact with it.

Evaluators can help

Evaluators have the tools and experience to help exhibit developers make informed decisions about access. The ADA regulations, important as they are, are too general to address the core processes of exhibit development. The law simply states that public facilities, including museums, must be accessible to everyone. And it cites a few museum-specific architectural and communication-related regulations. Since interactive exhibits are not specifically part of the ADA equation, determining whether an exhibit provides an inclusive learning environment is an important task, best carried out by an evaluator.

Developing a Plan for Evaluating Accessibility

We find that we are most successful when we test for access throughout the project, from front-end through summative evaluation. For example, when we first started to work on the Secrets of Aging exhibition, very little had been written about the needs and preferences of older adults in science centers. To find out more, we held focus groups where we interviewed older adults about the design and content of our permanent exhibitions. We then learned that older adults prefer exhibitions that are well lit, contain seating and resting areas, and are well organized. We also brought in older adults to test prototypes once the exhibition became further developed. During these sessions we learned that angling labels made them easier to read for people who wear bifocals. Since we had gathered this information well in advance of actually designing the exhibition, we were able to incorporate this information into the final design. This effort paid off in the end. Results of the summative evaluation showed that older adults found the design of Secrets of Aging more comfortable than that of our permanent exhibitions. To learn more about creating exhibits for an older audience, read Exhibit Accessibility and the Senior Visitor.

We arrange for visitors with disabilities to visit the museum and interview them directly. This approach provides the most reliable information. Visitors with disabilities CAN and DO speak for themselves. More importantly, caretakers or representative organizations may have different views on what the visitor can and want to do.

Keep in mind that it does take more time to evaluate an exhibit with people who have disabilities. Arranging for them to visit your museum can be time consuming.

Front end evaluation

Through past experience, we have learned that having a disability not only impacts a person’s ability to interact with an exhibit environment, but his or her different experiences can lead to different perceptions and an altered knowledge base. For this reason, it’s important to include visitors with disabilities in front-end evaluations that examine visitors’ prior knowledge. When we were creating Secrets of Aging, we found differences in the conceptions that visitors with disabilities had about aging and human biology. For example, visitors who were deaf were less likely to know that the heartbeat consists of a rhythmic pattern of two sounds (lub-dub). Visitors who have been blind since birth were less likely to know about the physical attributes associated with different racial and ethnic groups (i.e., Asian Americans tend not to be natural blondes).

Formative evaluation and prototyping

On-going formative evaluation is an integral part of all exhibit development at the Museum of Science. In addition to the regular, randomly appearing visitors, we invite people of various ages and abilities to test our exhibit prototypes. This has prevented us from making some very costly mistakes in the final design.

Before you invite visitors with different disabilities to test your designs, you can do some preliminary testing in the shop. When you have a rough model, test it with a borrowed wheelchair (many institutions have at least one). Can you reach things? Is there enough room for your knees and the footrest under the table? Then try interacting with the component with your eyes closed. Can you find things? Do you have access to all of the information that you need? Trying a component or layout while sitting in a wheelchair or closing your eyes will quickly let you know if you need to rethink some design elements. Once you feel OK about the design, it is important to check it out with some potential users.

Please see Exhibit Prototyping

Some things we learned while testing components with visitors who have disabilities:

When two-dimensional tangrams (plastic geometric shapes) were replaced by three dimensional building blocks the "Show or Tell" Messages activity became accessible to blind users.

Show or Tell?; a building activity in "Messages"

Sound creates access but also unwanted noise. The noise level in Messages proved distressing to more than one blind advisor. Prototyping helped us to find a balance between wanted and unwanted sound.

We didn’t expect kids in wheelchairs to be able to do the "Motion Match" activity, in the Investigate exhibit. But during a prototyping session they suggested a simple change that made the activity possible for them - and easier for everyone else.

Motion Match activity in "Investigate!"

There is no such thing as large-print braille. "Welcome To The Universe", an exhibit in the planetarium lobby, features touchable scale models of the planets of the solar system. Each planet is identified by its name in raised letters and in braille. We prepared a prototype label using a thermoform process, assuming that the braille should be scaled up, to match the scale of the lettering. Then we ran it by one of our advisors – a man who is blind and who reads braille. Our advisor was polite but clearly baffled. His difficulty with the label was twofold: Braille cells are a standard size. They should not be scaled up. Also, we had chosen Grade I (beginners) braille; Grade II, which uses letter contractions, is the standard braille used by readers. Then there was the lettering issue: Several people with low vision found the original raised typeface difficult to read. At their recommendation, we switched to block type. It would have been a pity to have (literally) cast those errors in bronze. That didn’t happen, simply because we checked the prototype with a few consumers.

Summative/ remedial evaluation

When considering whether we have "successfully" created a universally designed exhibition, we tend to ask ourselves two different questions:

• Do the visitors leave the exhibit and feel that they had a satisfying and meaningful experience (i.e. Do they leave saying "I was ‘able’ to learn and have fun here")? And
• Was the exhibit able to achieve its educational goals with people who have disabilities?

Also during the summative evaluation, we found it important to examine access barriers that we could not address earlier, such as wayfinding, lighting, sound pollution, and availability of resting spots. The following is a list of questions that we have found helpful when evaluating how comfortable an exhibition was for visitors with disabilities:

• What exhibit features or accommodations did you like the most?
• In what ways could the exhibit be improved to better meet the needs of people who are ____?
• Were you able to successfully navigate through the exhibition? If not, why not?
• Were you able to find enough areas to rest in the exhibition? If not, where did you need to rest?
• Did you feel there was enough lighting in the gallery? If not, were there any areas in particular that needed more lighting?
• How much did you rely on the audio help in the exhibit? Did you find it useful? Was it set at a comfortable volume?
• How much did you rely on the text or written information? Were the labels clearly written and easy to see? If not, which ones in particular did you find difficult to read?
• Were there any exhibit stations that confused you, or that you found difficult to operate? If so, which ones?

Evaluation instruments used when testing Secrets of Aging:

Exhibition Rating Sheet (used with older adults)

Questions used to interview visitors with disabilities about the exhibition

Tips on Finding Participants

Developing informal relationships with individuals and groups – people of all ages and with all kinds of disabilities – is the most effective way to develop universally accessible exhibits that work for everyone. A good starting place is a public or private agency that serves your area. They are repositories of all kinds of information and referrals.

The ASTC website is another excellent place to start making advisor contacts in your locale. Go to "Getting Started" in the "Accessible Practices" section.

In our experience, local schools for youngsters with visual, hearing, mobility and learning disabilities, as well as local rehab/physical therapy programs are a great source of eager, interested kids with good ideas. We’ve also worked with a parents’ group connected with a local children’s hospital, the recreation department of a rehabilitation hospital, Centers for Independent Living, and a variety of individuals who are generous with their time and advice. Regardless of how you begin, your initial contacts will quickly grow into a network of advisors. We pull different people together as needed, for help with specific problems. Other people find more formal group meetings helpful.

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