Celebrating 35 Years of the ADA
Inclusive Audio Tours -- For All?
The year 2025 marks the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The anniversary is a good time for museums and other cultural venues to refocus efforts on meeting the legal, moral, and curatorial challenges of providing access and inclusion for all people, especially people with vision loss.
One important tool is the Inclusive Audio Tour – to use in a museum or on a museum's website. Some museums use accessible tours for people with vision or hearing loss. An Inclusive Tour is for all visitors to a venue or website.
Like an accessible audio tour, an Inclusive Tour weaves together language for the ear, the emotional power of sound, friendly narration, and audio description (AD). Audio description uses words to represent the visual world and helps people who are blind or have low vision participate in visual culture. In the past 20 years, venues have discovered that audio tours written with AD can make exhibitions accessible to people who are blind or have low vision.
During that time, I have written and produced accessible tours with AD for many museums. To name just a few, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, Grand Central Terminal, and the World Trade Center’s One World Observatory.
But I have shown that it's possible to create Inclusive Tours that serve both visitors with sight AND visitors with vision/hearing loss. It’s a design that integrates audio description with curatorial or historical information -- an approach that supports inclusiveness, not just accessibility. All visitors can share common experiences and are not separated by ability. And producing one tour instead of two can be cost effective for a museum.
The key to a successful Inclusive Tour is finding the correct balance of artistic or historical context and audio description, in a length that won’t bore the visitor. A skilled writer, working with the client, needs to determine how much audio description is adequate for a person who can’t see the artwork or artifact and how to integrate it with the other information.
And sighted visitors often appreciate the added level of description because it sharpens their viewing experience (“Oh, I didn’t see that.”) and affirms their perceptions (“Ah yes, I knew that was blue.”)
A few venues I have written Inclusive Tours for include the National Museum of the Army, CDC Museum, New-York Historical Society, Four Rivers Environmental Education Center, Chumash Museum and Cultural Center.
The best thing any audio tour can do, for sighted or blind visitors, is to help them look more closely and carefully. An Inclusive Tour can focus attention, making for a richer experience, especially for sighted visitors who choose not to read wall labels.
If there is a downside to an integrated approach, some people with vision loss may want more detailed audio description, and that is a valid criticism. In that case, a museum might add an optional "layer" of AD or extra stop to a tour. But I have found that in most cases, Inclusive Tours can be shared by both audiences, whether in a museum or on a website.
Many museums long ago followed ADA guidelines and widened the entrance or installed a wheelchair ramp. That is one kind of access. But museums can also provide programmatic access for all visitors with an Inclusive Audio Tour.
For more on the design of accessible tours and how museum educators or curators can learn the art and craft of audio description writing, visit this website: www.writingad.org.
Lou Giansante is award-winning writer, producer, and narrator of audio tours for all audiences, with special expertise in writing for children and for people with vision loss.
