Museum Accessibility in Munich

"Making art more accessible in Munich"

What it is about

Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and residents can benefit from access to public spaces such as museums where they experience art and educational exhibitions in a community space. However, for disabled people visiting museums can sometimes pose a challenge.
The project aims for an improvement regarding accessibility in museums in Munich by highlighting the most accessible and two least accessible museums for disabled people in a website. The focus groups for this project are the blind and visually impaired people as well as mobility restricted people.

How we built it

The first step to develop this product was the data collection. We gathered geospatial points of the transportation system in Munich and the museums displayed in the general map. General information related to the museum accessibility was available in the culture barrier-free Munich website and we also visited some museums to check some architectural features regarding accessibility.
The website was written in HTML, and is hosted via GitHub. Web development was done using Visual Studio Code. The site includes an integrated web map designed in Mapbox Studio, as well as floor plans from the museums made in the BIM software, Vectorworks and the icons, alongside details of the resulting plans, were made in Adobe Illustrator.

Challenges we ran into

We faced some challenges regarding the data acquisition for the basemap, the symbolisation on the website and the data acquisition to prove accuracy of the floorplans for each museum.

What we're proud of

We are pleased with the results of this visual and approachable product for individuals with disabilities who wish to appreciate art in Munich since we discovered that information on accessibility to museums is mainly displayed in texts on most websites.

What we learned

To make it simple to recognize the crucial elements for accessibility to the museums, we learnt how to transmit all the information already present in the websites in a more graphic way. We also developed our ability to collaborate with our knowledge despite our different backgrounds.

What's next

Although the website's initial goal is to highlight the most and least accessible museums, we think the first improvement would be adding more information with the same scheme regarding other significant Munich museums like the Deutsches Museum, the Bayerisches Museum, and others. The addition of an audio component to the website for the blind and visually impaired is another important improvement that could be added.

Sources

Students
Natalia O’Dell
Lucia Ganchozo Llano

12th intake
Supervisor
Juliane Cron, M.Sc.
Keywords
Munich, museums, accessibility, art, architecture, web map
Try it