The title of this post, 'Gazing dreamingly into the distance' is taken from the audio description of a photographic portrait of writer Arthur Rimbaud as made by the MMK in Frankfurt, Germany. This is an evocative description to anybody who knows what such an expression looks like, but a person who was born without sight will have zero reference to what this might mean. The audio description was made with the aim of 'removing barriers on our [MMK's] website by means of alternative image descriptions'. The audio descriptions made by the MMK consistently introduce such poetic phrases that are potentially gibberish to their target audience. This could have also easily been avoided by changing their frame of reference ever so slightly. A sentence like 'He appears involved in thought and disconnected from the world' would cover the same load, for example, without including such intangible references to sighted phenomena.
The MMK is a museum with an international reputation and a strong self-proclaimed focus on accessibility. When I visited the museum two years ago, however, I found their accessibility provisions lacking and even insulting to a degree.
My first introduction to their accessibility program was their 'Leichte Sprache' exhibition guide. Leichte Sprache, or easy language, is a program initiated by the German government to create texts with shorter sentences of commonly understood words so as to make hermetic or difficult to understand topics more broadly accessible. As I'm of the opinion that too many art texts are full of aggrandising and obfuscating bullshit, I naturally welcome these efforts.
On page six of the Leichte Sprache booklet I encountered a QR-code that will take you to a webpage with 'audio descriptions of the artworks for people with visual impairments'. It goes without saying that any visually impaired person is never going to find a printed QR-code on page six of such a booklet, let alone take a picture of it. So even before they got started the MMK already failed to provide an accessible environment that people with disabilities are able to navigate independently. My criticism of the MMK's accessibility program thus could have ended here, but unfortunately it is only the start.
Before we continue it must be noted that the QR-code in question is only found in the Leichte Sprache exhibition booklet. In the regular exhibition booklet no reference is made to these accessibility options. This in turn implies that visually impaired people are also unable to understand the normal exhibition text, or that all kinds of disabilities are meant to be grouped together and separated from what is considered 'normal'. This is of course absurd, as any visually impaired person who desires to overcome the extremely high barriers to better understand visual art must naturally be an intellectually curious person and probably has a lot more experience with text than your average adult.
But if at this point they haven't walked out of the museum in disgust and actually had somebody help them navigate their phone to find the audio descriptions, then they would find that it only gets worse. When I scanned the QR-code with my phone using a screen reader, I heard the following:
What you're hearing is the loading of the webpage and then me, as a sighted person, selecting the play button. What follows is the screen reading software simply rattling off the consecutive numbers of the time indicator. The result of this is that you can't even hear the audio file the MMK provided. I also tried to navigate the website using screen reading software on desktop computers and it they all had some kind of problem with navigating the playback of the audio description, if I could get the software to find or select the play button at all.
These problems are the direct result of the way the MMK chose to set up their website. Its design is sparse and relatively easy to navigate visually, but because of the code that makes this possible, it's almost impossible to navigate with a screen reader. And if you can't navigate a website with a screen reader, then it's going to be impossible for any blind person to find the required information on that website.
The Web Accessibility Initiative provides a Web Content Accessibility Guideline. In version 2.1 of this guideline, under section 1.2 related to time-based media, the broad reaching advice is that a website should 'provide alternatives for time-based media'. In other words, time-based media, like the pre-recorded audio description the MMK provides, should be avoided, because it often, if not always, creates accessibility problems. The approach the MMK has chosen is thus patently wrong. An audio description, if meant to be played back on a user's own device, should have been made available in text format, preferably with some kind of high-level hierarchy for navigation purposes. In this way text to speech software could process it without any problems, thereby providing the user with the information in a way they are familiar with.
Which brings us to another shortcoming of the audio descriptions of the MMK. People using screen readers are often used to the specific flat intonation of the software and are able to listen to it at very high speeds. For their English audio description, the MMK used somebody who speaks very slowly, with a lisp and a far from perfect English accent, making it agonising to listen to when you just want to hear the information the text provides.
As already alluded to in the beginning of the text, the information itself is also by and large unsuited for people with congenital blindness. In the first text I listened to, there were many references to sighted phenomena, like 'black and white', 'out of focus', 'a beam of light directing attention' and things being 'visible through the windows'. In contrast, the quote-unquote normal description of this work had no reference to these kind of purely visual aspects and instead focussed on the movements of the figures in the work and the context in which they were depicted. This provides broader information about the work that is useful to everybody. Instead the MMK's audio description for people with visual impairments is a list of things only sighted people can see. Which might make sense on paper, but by doing that in a way that mostly references
phenomena that can only be understood through sight, they completely
missed the mark.
With these observations about the web environment of the MMK, it should come as no surprise that navigation inside the museum is likewise poorly managed.
On their website the museum boasts that that they are 'pleased to receive the certification from Reisen für Alle.' They go on to say that 'Reisen für Alle is a nationally valid label in the field of accessibility'. If you, or the museum, would actually read the rapport that Reisen für Alle made, it quickly becomes clear that there is still a lot of improvements that can be made. To give a few quotes from the rapport: 'The entrance area is not recognizable by a tactile change in the floor covering', 'The door or door frame is not visually contrasted with the surroundings','
There is no tactile information about the floor at the beginning and end of the flights of stairs', 'The walkway from the entrance door to the counter/desk/cash register is not marked with visually contrasting markings (e.g. carpet)', 'There are obstacles, e.g. columns, in the room', and so on, and so on.
The critical remarks that Reisen für Alle have made in their report are very much in line with the things I noticed during my visit.
This is an image of the entrance to the museum. There are many columns in front of the entrance, a number of unmarked steps, and the entrance itself is a revolving door. This already makes the regular entrance a small obstacle course for unsighted navigation.
Inside, some tactile floor markings are placed immediately after the revolving door. But it's only the warning kind, with nothing following it. They also weren't present on the outside of the entrance. So instead of providing a route to the next important step in the visit, like an information point, an unguided blind visitor is greeted only by a single confusing floor marking and then a large open space with no other indicators.
It must also be said that in the back of this picture there is a 'regular' door for entering the museum. This door, as far as I understood, is closed unless some employee of the museum opens it. This alternative entrance also has a single strip of tactile floor marking on the inside of the building, but for some inexplicable reason this is covered up with a floor mat.
Near the desk is a muted, but subtitled, video of a woman providing the exhibition text in sign language. I personally don't really see the point to show providing two different ways of visual textual information, but hey, that might be me. Sign language provides the benefits of spoken language, such as facial expressions, body language, intonation and so forth. None of these things are essential to an informative text.
Moving on from this sidenote to the exhibition floors, we see that the mistakes continue. To illustrate this, I would like to focus on the tactile floor plans that are placed on each floor of the MMK:
There are a number of problems with this 'aid' and it has clearly been created by, and for, sighted people.
Firstly, the effectiveness of such a floorplan without any (references to) guiding floormarks in the surrounding area is questionable. Visual impairments don't come with a magical intuition for, and perfect recollection of, distance and proportion.
But let's presume it could be a useful guide. In that case, the only properly marked and textured area is called the 'luftraum', which is translated as 'outdoor'. This really doesn't mean outdoor at all, but simply indicates which part of the building have extremely high ceilings. As most of the other rooms are already four to six meters in height, such a distinction on a floorplan for non-sighted navigation is pointless.
Furthermore, all walls have been rendered as single lines in the floorplan, so that a row of open windows and a row of pillars both appear as single dots. Yet the tactile sensation of a hole in the wall and a solid column is markedly different.
The floorplan also does not account for temporary changes to the layout of the rooms. The presence of sculptures or other obstacles on the floor are not marked, for example. During my visit, there was a temporary wall built right behind the floorplan, and this wall is not marked on this floorplan. As a guide for self-guided movement through the space this floorplan is thus entirely useless.
As we have seen, the MMK has done very little to make its facilities more accessible to visually impaired visitors and in their attempts they might have even actively worsened the experience.
It might seem a bit of a stretch to chastise a museum of visual art for not being attuned to the needs of those with visual impairments. Indeed, I personally believe the only adjustment an art museum should ever make to visually impaired visitors is the availability of well-trained guides who are able to both physically and intellectually walk them through the exhibitions, and wherever possible supervise some amount of physical interaction with the works.
My point is that if one wishes to make lofty claims about accessibility in their promotional material, it is shameful and despicable to merely inconsistently implement a number of measures where the visual design takes precedence over practical use.
