Here’s a statement you don’t hear every day from a blind blogger: I spent a morning last week at an art museum. I wasn’t the only blind person at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that day, either. Sina Bahram was there, too.
I met Museum of Contemporary Art’s Chief Content Officer Susan Chun in early September when she and I both spoke at “Greater Together,” Chicago’s first Cultural Accessibility Summit. The Museum of Contemporary Art had hired Sina Bahram to help them design an accessible website, she mentioned Sina’s work during her talk, and she sought me out afterwards to invite me to meet him the next time he visited Chicago.
Sina Bahram is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), a consulting firm that works with museums all over North America so that all visitors, including those with disabilities, can access the facilities and appreciate what’s inside.
Sina has had a visual impairment since he was born. When he was little, he used to get really close to his older brother’s computer screen and squint. “But that didn’t really work out so well!” Today he uses a screen reader, and he’s working on a Ph.D. in computer science in human computer interaction at North Carolina State.
The tagline for Sina’s company is “Innovation through passion, technology, and universal design,” and Sina’s own passion for the subject really comes through when you meet him.
“My company has a deep belief that making things accessible starts with universal design,” he told me, explaining that they don’t start a project thinking about how to make a building or a website accessible for people who have visual impairments or mobility impairments or another specific group. “We want to help our clients to design — and create — things that can be enjoyed by all users.”
I would have thought that designing a site for the Museum of Contemporary Art, where they especially want to show off the beauty of their artwork and exhibits, would be difficult. But Sina says that’s because of this commonly held belief that if something is accessible it can’t be pretty or creative, it has to be ugly and boring.
That is wrong, and spreading that myth can harm everybody from designers and developers to users. Sina says you can make anything simultaneously beautiful and accessible, and you can see, ahem, that for yourself now: Museum of Contemporary Art unveiled its new website a week ago using Coyote, a toolkit and project to create and publish visual descriptions of all of the images on the Museum of Contemporary Art’s site.
And that’s a lot of images!
The Coyote software was developed by Sina Bahram’s team at Prime Access Consulting, and it’s an open source tool. Staff members from all across the museum used Coyote to produce image descriptions that allow people who are blind or have visual impairments to “engage more fully with the visual arts.” Check it out.
A version of this blog post appeared Monday, November 16, 2015 on the Easter Seals national blog.
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