New Foundations: Principles for Disability-Inclusive Museum Practice

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to provide museum professionals with a practical road map to improving outcomes for people with disabilities in their museums. Written by a museum researcher with autism, this paper weaves museum research with interdisciplinary studies, while prioritizing the voices of people with disabilities, in order to develop clear, well-defined, and customizable steps for making the museum as an organizational unit more welcoming for people with disabilities. It examines several issues within the field, such as the overwhelming childhood focus of museum accessibility programming, the need to include people with disabilities in the process of creating inclusive practices, the importance of focusing on the larger picture as opposed to small issues, creativity in accessibility, and the dangers of performative accessibility and suggestions to avoid it, combining literature on each topic with the author's own knowledge of disability and museum accessibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Accessibility
• museums
• inclusion
• equity
• guidance
• administration
• disability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Langa et al., “Improving the Museum Experiences of Children”; Cho and Jolley, “Museum Education for Children with Disabilities”; Lurio, “Engaging Children with Autism at Historic Sites”; Greenberg and Levinsky-Raskin, “Supporting Transitions.”

2 Greenberg and Levinsky-Raskin, “Supporting Transitions.”

3 “Falling Off The Services Cliff.”

4 Bolton et al., Policies for Increasing Employment.

5 Eaves and Ho, “Young Adult Outcome of Autism Spectrum Disorders”; Wyman and Claro, “The UCLA PEERS School-Based Program”; Blazer and Research Services Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Review of the Research on Inclusive Classrooms.

6 “Autistic Self Advocacy Network – Home.” The term seems to originate, according to James Charlton's aptly named Nothing About Us, Without Us (1998), in the disability rights movement of South Africa.

7 Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody.”

8 Seale et al., “A Participatory Approach”; Rix et al., “Emergent Analysis and Dissemination”.

9 Milner and Frawley, “From 'on' to 'with' to 'by.’”

10 Ibid.

11 McDonald et al., “You can't be cold and scientific”.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Milner and Frawley, “From ‘on’ to ‘with’ to ‘by’”.

15 Mitch Smith, “Justice Department Investigates Experiments”; Ilyes, “Psychology's Eugenic History.”

16 Sandell et al., “In the Shadow of the Freakshow.” Comment: http://www.dsq-sds.org/.

17 Please note, that this research is not intended to imply that people with disabilities are not sought for advice at these museums or other museums, however, only that there is no public acknowledgement of those who are spending their time and effort to support these museums.

18 Social narratives, also known as social stories, are a kind of support used to help autistic people understand social situations. Using a visual format to show the components of a social situation, for example a museum visit, the intent is to help establish the context of a social situation. Often they are similar to comic books or story books.

19 Alicia Bolton et al., Policies.

20 Noe-Bustamante, Mora, and Lopez, About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx.

21 Roselli, “#accessiBe Will Get You Sued”; Glaser, “Blind People, Advocates Slam Company Claiming to Make Websites ADA Compliant.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ross Edelstein

Ross Edelstein is a Special Education PhD Student at Indiana University and a Graduate Assistant at the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands. He has a Master's in Museum Studies from Indiana University – Purdue University – Indianapolis, and has worked with many museums in the Indianapolis area to help promote accessibility. His research primarily focuses on cultural accessibility, with a particular emphasis on how institutions can support people with autism. He has an extensive background in research, training, and advocacy. He is also a person with autism.