Abstract

For generations, large swaths of the population, including those who are blind and partially blind, have been mostly marginalized from experiencing visual art at museums. In recent years, audio description (AD) has emerged to facilitate those individuals’ experience of museum artwork. However, such ADs are typically created solely by museum professionals, mostly without input from visitors. Thus, a team of multidisciplinary scholars and museum professionals investigated the development of AD collaboratively by museum professionals and visitors through a workshop at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. A team comprising visitors who are blind, partially blind, and sighted along with museum professionals experienced the George Washington Carver portrait by the artist Betsy Graves Reyneau toward the development of AD. Subsequently, the museum professionals evaluated the workshop’s outcomes—four ADs from four different positionalities—virtually with English-speaking museum visitors. This research revealed that museum visitors who are blind, partially blind, and sighted can experience museum art meaningfully through a workshop on the inclusive co-creation of AD. We found that museum visitors prefer culturally diverse perspectives and contributions from lay and professional observers, a mixture we refer to as “pluripositional.” We also found that the museum visitors enjoyed simultaneous listening to AD of artwork when viewing the artwork in a web-based experience. These findings support the need for multimodal (digital and analog) museum experiences that engage blind, partially blind, and sighted museum visitors in the inclusive co-creation of ADs of artwork accompanied by open access to their pluripositional outcomes.