Marco Lurati

MCI website

Accessibility kit for museums

- file://nwrCH6d65HEoC8Lc

Abstract

The MCI website is the home of the research project aimed at finding and share solutions that can be implemented to make museums more accessible to people with visual impairment. The project has been developed with the leading museums and the blind and partially sighted association UNITAS in Ticino, Switzerland.

Datas

year

2017

scope

SUPSI LCV, web development

website

www.mci.supsi.ch

process

The journey of the project can be resumed in two steps. The first is the research part about the workshops and experimentations done with each museum by touching the topics about accessibility in different ways.

The second part is the delivery of a simple online kit containing the guidelines built and developed during the research phase that any museum could use to improve its accessibility to anyone visiting it.

A website has been built to document and make public all this process and the final kit. The website has grown with the project, and many adaptations and parts have been added with time to share and publish the content created during the process.

I've been involved in the design of the website to keep it simple, straightforward, and effective, and I took care of its whole development. I was the only developer on the project for the website.

The accessibility was not only related to the activities and contents; the website had to be fully accessible to modern vocal readers on PC and smartphones. This is to give an example of a website with good accessibility.

To achieve this, I had to dive into the rules of HTML5 to properly use the correct tags and structures to make the pages perfectly accessible from both the code point of view and the design (visual and content flow).

I had the chance to test the website with some blind and visually impaired people who gave feedback on how to make the usability and accessibility of the website better.

Being a Swiss project, the website had to be in three main languages (Italian, French, and German). The website is fully responsive.

The website is based on Kirby CMS, a flexible PHP file-based CMS that uses markdown files to store the content and not a standard database—loving using it.

  • The homepage, the menu and one of the kit pages
  • Some of the workshop activities
  • This is a special page build for a workshop during the research that shows how to properly describe a painting through audio
  • A page of a kit resource that gives back precious infromations to improuve the accessibility

skills

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