Accessibility Symposium - Afternoon panel

Dave Hollands: Well I was happy to hear that that five minutes might be allowed to be a generous ten. I know in each of our cases, actually in my case, we've been working on this aspect of a job for a little over ten years and I couldn't imagine how I could figure it out to represent the breadth and try at least to do in five minutes. So I thought I might be able to pick up on the theme that Christine Karzca introduced this morning about the journey that the ROM has taken. But really it begins with the cultivation of attitude. And putting all of the staff basically on that learning curve. So some of what I have to show you will underline as examples of the kind of things that the ROM and set of beings that Christine would have had to work with on a regular basis. In fact, if any of you have been to IKEA lately, you would have noticed that they have a program that covers off, the...public communication about their sustainability and community partnership initiatives. That they have decided to call it the never ending list. And I thought, boy, is that ever close to what we've been feeling for the last ten years working on this. And it really was a sink or swim sort of thing where if we were honest with ourselves about the nature of the past, once we identified the range of things that we really wanted to accomplish. And started to itemize it as a series of lists. Imagine all the different formats for example, that we might present the ROM experience in order to have it be a more inclusive relationship. And it was an incredibly long list. So we decided to stop focusing on the areas where we were coming up short and just really think about the things that were accomplishments. And that result, Christine Karzca sat down with all of the sort of worker-bees at the ROM and we crafted a list. And it was that thing that she would come back to us before every meeting and say, so guys, what are you going to give me this time that I can take to the board? And it was amazing how we were able to continuously generate improvement that knock things off that list but boy, things were added to it every bit as quickly. So this slide just stands for the fact that we're working on, I think, our third generation large print guide which talks about the accessible features of the experience at the ROM. We came up with a new simple set based on the international symbols. That we wanted to be highly legible. And this of course includes a row in here of things that get at the nature of some experiences that ten years ago, we wouldn't even imagine that we would have been capable of doing. I just wanted to point out, um, on the subject of attitude. If you look at the way we treated the figures in these symbols. Um, the usual sort of stick figure devoid of humanity we wanted to avoid. I think Christine also advised about plagiarizing the possible, I think we found, is the universal access symbol. One very similar to the Museum of Modern Art museum. And we really loved the fact that it focused on the person's ability. It looked like they were doing something and going somewhere and so we designed all the rest of the symbol set around that one figure. So that people in the rest of the scenes were their equals. And the fact that their, it's active first and the fact that there is a wheel involved is almost secondary, but of course that is part of the communication. Christine, you'll forgive me if I show this picture. But this is just world that's born out of this image Yes, of course we're highly bureaucratized organization as Judith Snow pointed out this morning. When of the first things that Christine did was she figured out how to work not only with the grass-roots level, working across all of the staff to inculcate this attitude of "Now that I have done this, how can I consider all the other possible ways to make it more inclusive or accessible. She also worked from the top down to help the ROM create a policy in practice. And this was just around the time that we were started to work with the architect studio Libeskind on the Michael Lee-Chin crystal and the renovation of all those wings in the building. What we're in, was actually a former dinosaur gallery. Uh, and so this is a road trip where the senior staff of the museum was taken to a cutting edge facility that hadn't yet opened. In order for us to look at things like the customer service desks and you know, Christine is not a complainer, she is not one who's perspective is about, uh you know, here are the troubles, here are the problems let's remove the barriers. It was all about positive possible futures. And you know, here's a brilliant moment, where it was clear that all she needed to do was stand - sit/stand in front of this desk and all of the rest of us who are more vertical, who's heads are cut off in this scene, got it instantly. We were not going to design a customer service experience that felt and worked like this. So this spawned a whole series of activities where we worked hand in hand with the architects. Formed endless cardboard or foam-core models, uh, in order to really improve that relationship. This is Cheryl Blackman shaking hands with Joel Peters, who was here at the time as the head of Tourism Toronto. And because the architects came up with this idea of this big sloping plane for our first floor. All of our floor space at street level is in fact five feet above street level. So this is a totally accessible lobby in the sense that everybody uses the same way to get in. Well it introduced other interesting problems, we had a very long ticket list. If it were level, which we wanted it to be, for the comfort of the staff on our side of the desk. We developed a very extra tall head in one end and so we tested this and a whole series of other ergonomic features for the desk to assure that the repetitive tasks that our staff went through on one side and a range of heights of our staff. Here is a test that uses somebody, a taller staff visitor relations side and what would that mean for a visitor facing us across the desk and being so far down the wall. And in the end we were able to find the sweet spot where the desk began and with this sort of proud brow that really underlined the message of the extreme architecture that sort of bravely reminded us of the crystal. But any of the sit-down transactions meant it was comfortable to use on our end. And we have since enhanced this with various technology like being able to communicate to directly through hearing aids and if you prefer to communicate with us keyboard to keyboard, we can do that as well. So this is um, it's been a kind of infrastructure we are able to add to over the years. Um, you heard this morning about this particular moment in our history. This, to me, says so many things when the "Out from Under" exhibit was here. Which was a partnership with the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson. It was an education not only for our visitors but for our staff. And the fact that all of the multiple means of presentation were available in the exhibit through immense education from my own exhibit design staff. So all of the label texts, for example, was available as an audio podcast. Um, sign language podcast, facilitated touching of objects in the exhibit. Large print, braille, and so on. And the event that was associated with it, where we had a very large turn out, as well had, all the features of transcribed video and recording which was then publishable. And again, it was real learning opportunity for all of us who set up these things on a regular basis to understand what it's like to reach out to a more diverse audience. This is the actual dinosaur that Christine was referring to this morning. Christine - I don't know where are you? But this is a Maiasaura. It's a mother dinosaur. And this was a part of a sort of a grade of our existing audio program, which hits the highlights of our museum, and the idea was that eventually we would, I think we have reached about one in every three of the objects of this audio tour, and now available as a tactile experience as well. And, it works with raised text you can read as well as simplified braille, French and English, as is our standard. And as well, for the audio recording we've been able to add it at each of the stops a described audio experience for those who can't in fact see the real artifact or speciman that is on display. This is from our Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. I included this because it really was a kick for me this was a show where we ...... the dead sea, and so there's a video, there's label and photographs, there's a map nearby. And there's a lovely model, eminently touchable looking but I had added a "please do not touch" sign to it. And so that's when I really...sort of rubber hit the road and we saw people who really desperately wanted to touch this thing. And I'm talking about everybody, not just people who felt that they needed to touch it to understand it. So this is something that we've taken on board since that time in our Chinese Terracotta Warriors exhibition. We did have our guides in various formats including raised line diagram of some of the feature objects in the exhibition. Braille texts summarized as well as large print guide that pointed out the locations where there were touchable objects. Museums are very sensitive to the notion of putting fakes or reproductions into their exhibits, and we're not alone in worrying openly about that. And so it's always something that's important to us to make really clear the difference between the stand-ins and the real thing. In this case, it was very opportunistic, where we found a bunch of fakes on the internet where we could buy, this is actually a reproduction using the original clay from the original site. Painted up in such a way to be representative of the warriors in their day. And so, it was the most realistic tactile version we had experienced that we could manage. We had dramatic lighting, that was extremely low so we used these backlit new LED lit panel technologies from the latest from that area so that we can illuminate the artwork. This is an example of one of the touchable line drawings of the Mayan exhibition. And we do worry openly about things like whether or not people who have never seen and understood perspective can understand perspective in a line drawing. So we said what the heck, we just actually put both flat representations and perspective views out there on the floor. Because we do get feedback and we do constantly test and ask whether these things will work. Now we know that you are able to touch in the Mayan exhibition, from the downtown area of the Palenque city that is featured there. And we found that a really universal inclusive sense that these things do work for everybody, kids are all over this, adults are touching it, people who can see or people who can't see. Um, interest is very high for things like glyphs in the exhibit. And so this is the experience that captions sounds out in Mayan tongue, each of the glyphs in turn and you get to select English or French and all this was pre-tested with our accessible advisory group. And we are very proud of these things, the kind of things that I know that our colleagues at the Science Center have been doing things like, surtitling on all of their Mayan content for probably a couple of decades. And so it's the sort of thing, that we are constantly just keeping our eyes open and looking around. Everytime we're visiting a facility we're looking for things like that. I just want to end with this. Coming up in our new Ultimate Dinosaur exhibition will include probably fifty iPads and all kinds of technology including augmented reality in order to provide context and missing imagery that it isn't there. You can't imagine by looking at a dinosaur skeleton alone. So these are actually reactive walls. And they just sense the presence of the visitors so they are not touch screen or computer, there are sensitivity zones. Imagine that you approach it the way you would a connect game or a wii game. So it will respond and bring these scenic treatments to life, depending on the nature of your position in front of the screens. I just want to end by saying, one of the most important things for all of us in the learning curve is to remember our own personal journey in figuring out what makes a great connected experience for visitors in a museum setting. For me, I remember my youngest visit to the ROM, one it was one of those incredible school trips where you actually got to touch real stuff. And I will never forget that and ah, secondly I used to touch stuff that I am not sure I was permitted to but there was a meteorite and it was a smooth and hollowed out by its entry into the Earth's atmosphere, and that was something that I would never forget and so that really is the sort of thing that says you know, whatever the most visceral, most connected way to think about doing things, don't forget these are old-school all of the technology in the world will offer us a bright future but there is some really simple straight-forward things that we can do that will find resonance and attraction in all our visitors. So in this show we're actually going to be able to display this large reproductions of a vertabrae of a dinosaur, imagine the dinosaur that went with that single bone And we're going to ask people to imagine that. And this is our resident paleontologist, David Evans' hand, holding some real dinosaur fossil teeth that we're going to be able to hand around. And I just want to end by saying, there is no greater moment in the sort of ten years of this process that when we had Judith's exhibit on right next door and it was the presence of someone like Judith in that space who was able to facilitate the experience with the visitors. That someone was able to come and encounter the message of the paintings of that exhibition not only, but primarily the person. And encounter, first of all, her humanity and her intellect and upper most probably her creativity long before they would even begin to think about the fact about the wheelchair. And I think that's really the legacy that Christine Karzca has created for us in trying to figure out what to do. (clapping) Elgin Cleckley: Hi there. I wanted to start with this image, which is really great way to start talking about how we did accessibility at the Science Centre. You remember what the front of the Science Centre used to look like, right? It was a pool, there was a high wall, you had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the front door. We're not discrediting making architecture itself, but it's not exactly an inclusive way to say to people come on in, this is a place for people, this is a place for Ontario. And the space you see here is actually called telescape and if you really look at it in a various way There we go. If you follow that, this is a really nice way to design a ramp. So that you can go from street level at Don Mills Road to the front door. You want to make sure that it is accessible to get in and you want to make sure that it feels easy, why not stop on the way with an artpiece in the centre here. And that is Steve Mann's piece "FUNtain" and play around with the water and you realize on your right straight away move yourself from here, all of a sudden you're at the outside theater. And then you go in the front door. You don't have to make a ramp feel like it's a ramp. You can make it part of the landscape and what you see. And when we did the renovation of the Science Center and we decided to change most of the building in that sense about 40% of the building, we thought, maybe there are ways to start to look at doing these moments where people don't notice that its a ramp, they notice it's part of everything and it's a space for everyone. On top of that too, it's a great place for tai chi in the mornings. (laughing) But this summer, you'll see some moments, and I find it interesting when we blend together some of these images, you can see our development as a design department and also as scientists and also as hosts. This is the circus that is coming back this summer. We design exhibits that travel, and we design exhibits that are also close to here at the Science Center. So if you look at this, you've got a young man over here on a high-wire. If you look at the other side here you've actually got a person hopping up and down and bungee jumping. I'm not doing any of these things. (laughing) But people like to do these things, and so sometimes you like to watch people do these things. And we consider this position participation where it's an urban feeling and people who are actually not participating in it feel like they are still part of the action. There are realistic things we have to deal with - wait times, height restrictions, there's weight restrictions there's how busy of the day is it. So there's always a moment where as a host you sort of have to assess how we can make this space or how do we make the exhibit more accessible to people. Or how many of you have been in the situation, where you have a group of people who want to watch the experience and they feel like they are still part of it. In this experience when scientists saw them, a lot of these experiences, such as the high-wire, and the acrobatics, and things like watching sword swallower. We actually found a sword-swallower and we actually did a x-ray of watching, so you could actually sit there and pull the sword up and down and shove the sword back up and down inside someone`s throat. (laughing) This is a quite fun exhibit. And we also a great thing too, which firstly because kids love poo. So why not line up poo in a huge line down a hallway so that it's at a certain height and you can investigate different castings. Probably collecting the castings was a lot of fun. And you would have these castings that the kids can play with. But by doing these experiences, we realized what heights were right. How you would set up situations that people feel that they are a part of something while we are watching an activity. A lot of times we like to do practice runs. Go around the Science Center in a blindfold. Put yourself in a wheelchair, and use vision, with different glasses. And see what happens. Which led to the development of things such as the wheelchair, wheelchair racing, I mean. Having sport, which we will be doing our human limits experience in 2013. And also this experience of Facing Mars, this is an exhibit about proximity. This entire part of the exhibit which is back here, is all dependent on you having a wheelchair go up in front of those two proximity seats. This whole idea developed in being close together in space and how do you feel being that close. Well, we thought it would be a good idea to actually make dedicated experiences within the space itself, so that feeling of inclusion. This is a current exhibit, that I am working on now, and... It's actually touring...it's in Lawrence Hall of Science. And these experiences are also coming back to the Science Center and this is really about fully trying to make that experience that everyone can enjoy and also be a part of. This is imagining and we did things such as the work-stations which you see at the top and they can go up and go down, they can go left or go right, and at those workstations there's a hot glue gun, there's scissors, you can create birdhouses, you can create shoes, you can glue your mother's fingers together, whatever makes you feel that it's the right thing to do at the time. And these are all experiences that have happened. When people have opened themselves to these things. You can get close to ferrofluid, you can watch a ferrofluid hedgehog, reactive you can actually get inside there and there's magnets that pull up and down, or they can shoot clear into it. Tumble tubes, touch tables and facetime at the bottom here, where you can actually take a photo of your face and do some really cheap plastic surgery, on various eyes and noses to make a new face. But the reality of all of this is that we did different table heights, we made sure that the materials start four inches off the floor so that the perfect height maybe for a full grown kid and there are actually material in front of you. Really trying to make everything close to you but you know there is a way to look up the proscope to materials that you would get at a properly heighted table. This is Tell-tale Heart, it's a personal favourite of mine and part of it here is that everyone has a pulse. That is something we hope that everybody has. That's kind of a true point, so why not use what everyone has to do something collectively together? So what happens when you come to one of those platforms, and you make sure it's very clear underneath so that you can get to it any different position. And as more people collect themselves and take their pulse, it takes your pulse and transmits it up and to the top. It transmits it up the sides and it also builds at the top. So the more people that come and play along with it the more lights should you get. The noise is something between a gun-shot and a drum. So we wanted to create the right sound as a hearts beats but we came to this kind of in between noise as well. But you know, how to use colour and how to use light also we really wanted to focus on. So we focused on some differences in vision but also work with the sounds as well. On the left, we're doing some work, it's a new space the Weston Family Innovation Centre and this space is basically as accessible as you can get. We're trying to set up a system where we can use .....there is use... uh...used cradles, there's polarized art. It's all on shelves but it all can come off the shelves. So that when you're in the space, you can take everything off and you can move the tables you can investigate things on their own. And their own pleasure and space. We want to make sure that people are easily, can easily get to things within the space. Those center points here, are actually discovery boxes that you can pull out with reference to various stuff. And right here, this is the work that we did for the Royal Botannical Gardens and as you were saying one of the things that people like to do here is in English and French, you can switch the videos so you can words text based, making sure the focus is on a very clear background. That is very important to put up. Making sure that if you are in a wheelchair and you come to the base of that wall, you can open it up and get a really great moment looking at the barrell sample as well. And making sure that there are lots of opportunities to have as you work your way around. We also wanted to focus a lot on referencing things you would see at the Botannical Gardens because it is about touch, it is about seeing flowers, it's about seeing trees, it's about feeling the bark. So why not use the wood, cut etches in it that are in the shape of things that you would see at the Royal Botannical Gardens, and you take your hand and feel around the work. It's a real, I believe, happy moment when you see people kind of feel the walls. As far as I am concerned, that means they're, the experiences are getting them out of themselves a bit, sort of feel themselves more. So that's what I wanted to show you guys, just wanted to give you an idea of where we're going. And I find that this is a good way to end it too, in a sense of where we are at and we are always trying to keep ourselves open to new experiences and thinking about specifically who our exhibits are going to be and how we can expand those experiences. Thank you. (clapping) Jutta Treviranus: Thank you. You're making me blush. Um, actually, it's quite interesting we were talking about touch and the importance of touch and I always find very curious, what do we mean when we say "Let me see that."? We are already seeing it in most cases, we're in fact wanting to handle it, to manipulate it, and if you're a three year-old, it's probably also tongue it. Um, put it in your mouth. The experience does need to be multi- sensory. So thank you very much for that very embarrassing introduction. Um, as was said, um, I'm with the Inclusive Design Research Centre, and basically the main thing you need to know about us, is what we are trying to do, is to make sure that all of those things, all of those emmerging designs that are coming out, in terms of information and communication technology are designed for everyone. A design for diversity whether it's, um, design with respect to ability, language, culture or gender, age and other forms of human difference. So we try to design for human diversity and we're proactively addressing the beginning of the ICT “food chain". It's a lot of work when you have to retro-fit and it's a lot of work when something is already quite well established, as you probably noted when people were talking about things. So what we try to do is see the very beginnings of these emmerging practices. And we're a fairly sizeable group, over at OCAD U with partners around the world. More than 96 partners in every continent. We welcome partnership and participation and other elements of communities or in our projects. One of the things we recognize right from the beginning, is that none of us really are average or typical. I saw a bunch of starbucks cups coming into here and I can wager a bet that there's probably not the same request for any of the cups that arrived in here. And the most amazing and wonderful thing about living in this age is that we are experiencing this disruptive time when technology has, there are all sorts of things that are horrible about technology but there is one thing that is quite nice, and that is that it allows flexibility. And so when we are designing in digital time, unlike having to design a building that, which is made out of bricks and mortar. We have the opportunity to really re-think, disability and accessibility. So when we're designing we have this notion, new notion of this ability, which is that disability mis-match between the needs of the individual and the services, tools or environment. It's not a personal trait, it's relative to the context and goals. We can all be experiencing a disability and it's the responsibility of the design, environment service. The product to make sure that it matches our particular needs. So if someone, say is blind, and sitting in an auditorium and listening to a lecture that is all in audio, they're probably far less disabled than someone who has been up all night until 2 am, drunk a little bit too much and hasn't taken good care of learning the background information. Um, similiar, I can come up with many different examples. So accessible design is determined by the match or fit between the user and the tools, service or environment. And that as well is relative. And um, in the digital realm we have what we call "one size fits one" design. Personally optimized fit, mass customization adaptive design and you might ask, especially in a museum environment especially with economic times as they are and the difficulty designing anything for the whole variety, so is this really realistic? But if you think of it, digital really does enable personally optimized fit for close to 0 incremental cost because we can copy largely without a cost. It does need to be built into the systems from the start. We do need modularity, and we need transformability and we do need open standards because things change and, uh, constantly and so we need a common language to update our designs. And the other thing that of course is happening at the moment in terms of our digital economy, our digital times is that we have networks. And so we can recruit, um, many, many helpers, many friends distributed production, crowd sourcing variants, cumulative, collaborative design and development and iterative refinement. We all band together as museums or galleries and share and refine things and recruit other volunteers that are out there. So the types of things that we work on, are a lot of open-source reusable Web Components and Resources for those of you who want to create an accessible websites and also run usable websites, that are going to adapt to the needs of each visitor. We have things that allow you to cause your web experience to adapt to the individual that is encountering your web system. We have accessible tools for doing these sorts of tasks that you need to do within a museum because one of the things that we also recognize is that employees with disabilities also require access and so many tools that we are creating for museum environment include the types of tools that employers really might want to use. And we work on ways to capture and manage collections and we have a lot of educational resources that step through what you need to do. We integrated these, we use the same tools that we created for individual disabilities to also make sure that things can be translated into multiple languages and can be presented in multiple languages. And in some of our tools, for example here, we have 56 different languages that we're working on. um, and we, we're not.... When I was talking about touch, our work does relate to touching, because we're working on things like 3D printing of tactile replicas and 3D printing of tactile replicas that then have touchable spots which will allow audio to play and describe what or something about the particular resource. The examples that we see here, are of course are of two-dimensional paintings and so that this is, these are mass reliefs of two-dimensional paintings so that someone who is blind can get a sense of the masterpieces that are up in a gallery. We work on accessible kiosks, both physical designs of kiosks so that a child, a very tall person or someone in a wheelchair could reach the kiosk, and see the kiosk. Various controls so that maybe someone that doesn't have any voluntary pointing action can still control the kiosk. Um, mobile experiences of various forms, whether it's in the museum, post-museum, pre-museum, experiences and applications. And these are all examples. We also try to recognize that museums and galleries are very different, there's huge diversity in terms of people that work with them, the situations, the context, the resources that are available and needs. And so our supports, platforms, functions, and et cetera are also designed for diversity. So to an inclusive and engaging experience that accommodates for diversity. (clapping)