Launching a Pilot Program
Overview:
This module presents a step-by-step plan to launch a pilot program, based on the short-term goals established in conjunction with your Advisory Board. Included are practical considerations for each step, which you can adapt to your needs. To facilitate planning and meetings we include checklists and agendas, as well as troubleshooting and funding tips.
Practical Considerations: Launching a Pilot Program
- Step One: Identify and Adapt Existing Materials
- Step Two: Adapt Existing Programs
- Step Three: Create any Additional Materials
- Step Four: Outreach and Publicity Campaigns
- Step Five: Review and Revise
Funding strategies! Low Cost. No Cost.
Contributors and Reviewers:
Practical Considerations: Launching a Pilot Program
By this point, you have seen the range of possible programming, tools, and resources and you have set short-term goals with the members of the community or advisory board. Now you can outline the basic parameters of your program.
As discussed in the Advisory Board module, possible goals include:
- To provide accessible materials to the public, including print and Web media
- To establish a museum tour program for visitors who are blind or visually impaired
- To implement a docent and staff training program
- To establish a multi-session program with your local school district, or a community center for people who are blind or visually impaired
- To establish an on-site art-making studio program for people who are blind or visually impaired
- To create an Access Coordinator position or docent who will oversee this program
- To host and participate in events and conferences: your blind and visually impaired board members can speak at the events, or be panelists
- To increase employment and volunteer presence of people who are visually impaired or who have other disabilities
Starting a new program for a new audience may seem daunting. But keep in mind that few museums have a staff member dedicated solely to programs for visitors with disabilities. Often, museums postpone addressing the needs of visually impaired visitors until they have additional funds and staff. However, it is possible to create a small-scale program without special funds and with limited staff. We have seen it happen in many museums.
The key is to look to resources you already have, both within the museum and in the community, and to incorporate existing programs as much as possible.
Your educators and staff have a wealth of information and skills. With training, they can adapt to the needs of visually impaired visitors, much in the way that you tailored programs for families, schools, and seniors. You may discover that your staff and docents have experience with relatives and friends who have lost their sight. Use existing staff to develop a small-scale program that can be piloted and evaluated by your advisory board. Throughout the process, ask your colleagues at other museums for advice! They are your best teachers.
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Mariann Smith, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York on How Albright-Knox Began an Accessibility Program |
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Erin Narloch, Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin on How the Museum Launched an Accessibility Program |
Step One: Identify and Adapt Existing Materials
Below is a list of adaptations of existing materials. They are examples from other museum programs. Based on your goals, you may choose some or all of the following:
If you have: |
Then you can: |
Print Materials and Labels |
Create alternative formats that are accessible to those who cannot use traditional print materials. These include digital media, braille, and large print. If your museum does not have the resources for professionally printed large-print brochures, consider in-house computer-printed documents in large print, which can be placed at the information desk with traditional print materials. Local groups representing blind people can help you produce braille labels. Consider also creating a tactile graphic map of the museum's floor plan. |
Audioguides |
Add verbal description components to works on your audioguide tour. A few paragraphs added to the text for a group of well-selected works create a significant and accessible experience for a visitor who is blind or visually impaired. |
Accessible Web |
Make your Web site accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired through Accessible Web design. Accesssible web design considerations include font size, contrast and color, and formatting compatible with screen readers. Some museums offer visually impaired visitors online information that will prepare them for a museum experience, including background information on the artists, works, and cultural context. Your Web site is also an excellent way to provide general information about your accessibility program. Please see our Accessibility Tools training for more about these alternative formats, including resources and vendors. |
Physical Accessibility of Your Facility and Exhibition Design |
Our Universal Design will help you to educate your exhibition designers and curators about universal design features, provide tools for assessing accessibility of your facility, and connect you with universal design service and information providers. Some design accommodations, such as providing adequate seating, can be made without expensive reconfiguration of your physical structure. |
Step Two: Adapt Existing Programs
By definition, your accessibility program should make your existing programs and resources available to all audiences. Thus, adapting what you have is the best strategy. Below are examples of what has been done in museum programs across the country.
If you have: |
Then you can: |
Educator- and/or Docent-led Tours |
Add verbal description into selected tours in your schedule. Choose a limited number of objects that are representative of your museum's collection. Write verbal descriptions of the objects, review them with your visually impaired advisors for effective language, clarity and length of the descriptions, and appropriate pace of the tour. Include descriptions of gallery spaces and museum architecture throughout your tour. You can enhance your verbal-description tour with multisensory and tactile experiences. Think about objects that you might bring on your tour to assist the perception of the artwork and enrich visitors' experience. Educators have used: high-contrast reproductions, tactile pictures, props, touchable objects that are relevant to the representations, scents, and music of the period in order to stimulate discussion or enrich a verbal-description tour. |
Lecture Series |
Add audiodescription or verbal description, as above. In a large group or auditorium setting, individuals may access audiodescription through headsets. Other accessibility features to consider for lectures: sign language interpreters, infrared listening devices, or captioning. |
Family Programs |
To accommodate family members who are blind or visually impaired, add verbal description and tactiles to your family tours and programs. Touching models and props is a fun multisensory learning tool for all. If your family programs involve art making, see Art Making for adaptations and techniques. While many family programs are geared towards children, remember that adult family members, especially seniors, may also benefit from verbal description or tactiles. We have found that sighted students also enjoy and learn from this type of experience. Because the staff/participant ratio for programs for visitors with disabilities is so high, you may want to “recruit” some family members, especially if you are doing studio art, or dedicate a special weekend for this program when you can assemble a crew of volunteers. |
Teacher Workshops |
If your institution already offers professional development courses/workshops for art educators and classroom teachers, invite and include teachers of visually impaired students, and art teachers who have blind students in their classes. They will also be useful resources in developing other museum programs. |
Studio Program |
Art-making classes that your institution already offers to children and families can easily be modified to include blind children and their parents and friends. See Art Making for more information. |
Senior Programs |
Add verbal description, tactile diagrams and art-making or writing activities to your existing programs through senior community centers, or independent living centers, or facilities that serve homebound people. |
School Programs |
Multi-session programs that include visits to the classroom and museum are excellent candidates for developing an accessibility program. Many of the tools found in the Learning Tools section of Accessibility Training are used to some degree with all students and address a broad range of learning styles. Use tactile diagrams and verbal description to prepare students for the museum visit, followed by art making and other curriculum-extension activities. Training school-programs staff to use these tools and develop these skills can benefit all students served in your programs. |
Step Three: Create any Additional Materials
As you have seen in Step One and Step Two, you can establish much of your accessibility program by adapting existing programs. One of the primary resources for any accessibility program is developing verbal-description skills and a collection of verbal-descriptions scripts that have been reviewed by visually impaired advisors.
One program that may require more specialized preparation is the touch tour or multisensory tour. Touch tours build on existing skills and knowledge to design a tour that allows a visually impaired visitor to have a comprehensive picture of your collection or exhibition.
To Create a Touch Tour or Multisensory Tour:
- Meet with your conservation, collection management, registrar and curatorial staff to select objects appropriate for an initial tactile tour. Have a clear description of the parameters of the program. Create a wish list, with alternatives. Occasionally curators become interested in participating in these programs. Find out how other museums with touch tours have dealt with conservation issues. You can also contact a local conservator, or the American Institute for Conservation. This will help you to anticipate questions and concerns, and to provide some solutions used by other museums. See our sample Agenda: Curatorial, Collection Management and Conservation Staff for this meeting.
- Discuss safe handling procedures with curator, collection manager or conservation staff.
- While objects are being chosen, or if no appropriate objects can be designated, use other touchable objects, such as models, replicas, or props, to create a touch tour with four or five works of art. Other resources include Art Beyond Sight's Art History Through Touch and Sound tactile encyclopedia. Your museum shop, as well as other museums' online shops, may offer mass-produced models of artworks and design objects that can be used as part of your touch tour.
- Be creative: educators have created multisensory tours using scents, music of the period in galleries, or interesting touchable objects that can serve as a tactile metaphor for a visual characteristic of content or style.
- Verbal description is an essential part of your touch tour. Research and develop scripts for each object. Scripts should include verbal description as well as the background information you would provide on any tour.
- Read Touch Tours and Other Tactile Experiences for more information about touch tours.
Step Four: Outreach and Publicity Campaigns
When you have incorporated accessibility features into your existing programs, or established new independent programming, it is essential to simultaneously inform your public that these features are available, and welcome the public to your institution. Many people who are blind or visually impaired do not think of an art museum as a place with anything to offer them.
Some strategies for outreach include:
- Enlist your advisory board. They are your first contacts in the community, and will be familiar with the information channels.
- Include accessibility features on your museum's Web site, membership journals or publicity.
- Involve other departments. Your communications and development departments can use your new programming in museum publications, advertising, grant applications or funding events. Additionally, staff in these departments may suggest and provide other resources. In order to promote cultural sensitivity to your audiences, notify other departments, such as security and visitor services, about the program. Provide them with a written memo about your program, and a few suggestions about welcoming or assisting visually impaired visitors in the galleries This type of communication is also important in reducing space conflicts in the galleries. If possible, conduct Disability Awareness training. See also our Museum Team module for further information.
- Plan an Open House. Once you have developed accessible resources, you can expand your programming to different age groups and activities. Plan an open house to meet with the different audiences in your community, such as schools, or agency and community centers. This will also educate staff members about your program.
See our Community Outreach module for more information
Practical Considerations: Launching A Pilot Program
Step Five: Review and ReviseWe cannot overstate the importance of review and evaluation.
You must consult a visually impaired or blind advisor throughout the process of developing materials and planning your program, to make sure that you are clearly communicating information and meeting the needs of your audience.
After your initial tours, lectures, or other sessions, try to get both informal, immediate reviews from participants as well as more formal, documented evaluations. Try to separately document the educator's or session leader's impressions of the audience response, organizational glitches, and any other problems or improvements to be made. Documentation is important for future institutional memory and Making The Program Last.
With reviews in hand, meet with educators and advisors and address the comments from participants and session leaders.
Sample Agendas: Launching a Pilot
Agenda: Introductory Education Department Meeting
Program Introduction:
Why Teach Art to People who are Blind and Visually Impaired. (15 mins)
- Museum educators discuss benefits of teaching art to blind and visually impaired people. Introduce tools for creating access for visually impaired people, and discuss range of educational programming currently implemented. For more information about this, read the first chapter of Art Beyond Sight. A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual Impairment, eds. Elisabeth Axel & 2003.
Resources We Already Have. (15 mins)
- Outline how existing programs and resources can be adapted to the needs of the visually impaired community.
- Introduce advisory board findings.
- Present sources of funding and other financial resources.
Introduce Pilot Program , & Outline Role of Each Department Member. (30mins)
- Administrative support
- Funding support
- Teaching
- Outreach
- Training of docents and volunteers.
Evaluation, Reviews, Revisions, Expanding. (15 mins)
- How do we evaluate whether the program was successful?
- What are the next steps? How to expand pilot program.
- Develop tactile resources, such as models, diagrams or other materials.
- See Art Beyond Sight. A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual Impairment for further ideas.
Agenda: Curatorial, Collections Management and Conservation Staff Meeting
Introduce program
- Goals of program
- Structure of program
- Choice of items
- Examples: how other museums have organized touch tours
Conservation issues
- Protective measures: Gloves: disposable plastic or latex
- Supervision and guidance by staff
- Replicas or comparable objects
- Solutions used by other museums
- Representing themes within collection
- Other options for objects
- Curatorial participation in program
Checklist: Launching a Pilot Program
- Work with Publications Department for large-print signage and/or braille signage and materials
- Work with Web services on Web accessibility
- Meet with community partners
- Create contact lists
- Curators
- Museum staff, in addition to educators
- Education professionals from blindness schools
- Advocacy and community organization contacts
- Artists
- Consultants
- Write letter of introduction
- Generate mailings: letter of introduction, thank-you letters
- Evaluate possible objects in collection for tactile tour, with curators and conservators
- Develop alternative tactile experiences and objects
- Choose objects for verbal-description tour
- Write verbal-description tour and review with visually impaired consultant.
- Develop art making, writing, dramatic play or musical exercises for tour.
Troubleshooting Tips: Launching a Pilot Program
- Conference With Others. When introducing the idea of a new pilot to your supervisor and your administration, you may want to organize a telephone conference call with another museum that already has a successful, small-scale program. This will be an opportunity to reassure your director that accessibility is a feasible project.
- Don't Forget Advisors. Throughout the process, CONSULT WITH YOUR ADVISORS to ensure that your programs are successful in meeting your objectives and that your materials are effective.
- Educators Need Support. If your institution has no accessibility coordinator, the task falls on the shoulders of educators. Educators will need more support from volunteers because the student-staff ratio in programs with blind students must be higher. Finding volunteers, docents, and teaching assistants who are both qualified and comfortable working with blind people may be difficult at first. One solution: ask the families and friends of people who are blind and visually impaired to get involved with your program in some capacity. Again, your advisory board is an essential resource here.
- Outreach is Essential. The success of your program depends on it. Work on audience and program development simultaneously.
Funding Strategies! Launching a Pilot Program
Low Cost
- Once you identify your key community partners, such as centers for the blind, schools, and recreational facilities, ask if they are able to offer you discounts or in-house services to make your materials accessible in large-print or braille. Some facilities may even have tactile-printing equipment to make tactile diagrams, or professionals who can create a tactile map of your facility.
- Local agencies that represent or service blind people may enable you to get other services, use of facilities, or personnel time donated.
- Schools and centers for people who are blind can order art books and tactile books free of charge through Federal Quota. Those books can be the starting point for your program.
- If you don't have an art-making facility, you may be able to start an art-making program in conjunction with a local school or organization that has space and might even provide materials.
- Join Art Beyond Sight's Discussion Groups. Members often spread the word about grants and other funding possibilities through these listservs.
