The Badalona Museum (Barcelonès Nord) incorporates new resources from the Barcelona Provincial Council’s La Mirada Táctil program to make the contents of its permanent exhibition more accessible to people with sensory disabilities.
These are about forty digital tools for interpretive reading and audio description that make the Roman Baetulo more inclusive. On the one hand, up to 42 videos are released that describe the contents of the space of the baths and decumanus that occupy some 3,400 m of the Museum and that allow discovering the Roman city of Baetulo in situ. These videos incorporate a deaf person signing in Catalan to improve the communication needs of the deaf community; In addition, they have subtitles for the oral deaf community and voiceover for greater usability.
On the other hand, the Badalona Museum is also premiering the adaptation with audio description for blind people of the three-dimensional videos where the city of Baetulo, the Casa dels Dofins and the Casa de l’Heura are reproduced. With this resource, the visual content is much more intelligible for blind or visually impaired visitors thanks to the script work that has benefited from the advice of the museum’s archaeologists.
The accessibility improvements of the Museum are completed with the transcription in sign language and locution of the tactile points already existing in the original museography through QR codes, which facilitates its readability.
Since 2007, the Office of Cultural Heritage has been developing the La Mirada Táctil program focused on new approaches to museum content through tactile, auditory, sound, and olfactory resources and the use of both new technologies and analog resources to guarantee the access to groups with disabilities. In these times it has been possible to verify how the solutions of this program enrich the visit of all users, favoring more personal and emotional experiences of heritage, both in terms of users in general and of certain groups, in particular. .
