Audio guides for visually impaired people to the exhibition at the Marc Chagall House Museum will be presented in Vitebsk on December 7, BELTA was informed by the cultural institution.
Audio guides for visually impaired people to the exhibition at the Marc Chagall House Museum will be presented in Vitebsk on December 7, BELTA was informed by the cultural institution.
The audio guide, which describes the permanent exhibition of Marc Chagall's parental home, was prepared as part of the joint Belarusian-Polish project "Development of techniques for adapting information and art to the needs of the blind and deaf. Audio description for visually impaired people in museums, theatres and other cultural institutions."
Participation in the project has allowed the Marc Chagall Museum to address the issue of accessibility of museum and exhibition displays for people with visual impairments. "Usually, visitors perceive an exhibition visually by 90%. People with visual impairments are deprived of this opportunity. Audio description, or typhlo-commentary, allows to fill this gap through verbal description of the exhibition halls' space and main exhibits," the museum explained.
The audio guide for the visually impaired is not an excursion about the artist's life and his family, but a special verbal description that allows visually impaired visitors to familiarise themselves with the exhibition independently, to "see" the space and the arrangement of objects within it, and to form their own emotional impression. The audio guide includes 6 tracks recorded on tablets (20 tablets in total) - these describe the House-Museum, the shop, the boys' room, the living room, the red hall, and the kitchen. "In addition, we have a number of exhibits available for tactile examination for our visually impaired visitors," the museum emphasised. Guests can ask a guide for comments to clarify any points.
The project was created and funded by the Warsaw-based Human Doc Foundation and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland. Volunteers participated in its implementation - employees of the Belarusian Association of the Visually Impaired and other organisations, who were trained by their Polish colleagues.