Participatory Workshop: Cultural Accessibility with Inclusion at the Core

The MuseIT Project– Multisensory, User-centred, Shared cultural Experiences through interactive technologies (runs from 2022 to 2025 and co-funded by the Horizon Europe programme of the European Commission) will propose technologies that facilitate and widen access to cultural assets for people with disabilities, and helps preserve and safeguard cultural heritage in an inclusive way. Our project aims to co-design, develop, and co-evaluate a multisensory, user-centred platform for enriched engagement with cultural assets with inclusion and equal opportunity for all as core principles. To do so the project will attempt to co-design and develop:

• Multisensory representations and rendering of cultural assets
• Remote inclusive co-creation services for multi-modal born-digital cultural assets, and cultural engagements
• Formal specification and novel methodologies for multisensory, multi-layered repository towards (long-term) preservation of cultural assets.

Objective & agenda of the workshop:

The principles of Inclusion, Accessibility and ‘Equal Opportunities for all’ are central in the MuseIT project. Particular focus is placed on the development of systems that can satisfy all people’s needs for cultural activities and experiences. Though not specifically mentioned, the concept of “all” or “for all” we refer to all people regardless of their perceptual modalities and variations in cognitive and functional abilities. MuseIT is concerned with cultural heritage as both physical evidence of human activities and intangible societal attributes. This workshop aims to identify what you regard as essential in these terms to experience culture as a process of co-creation and/or co-design by all. What are your perceptions of how you or your visitors/consumers/users engage with different digital representations of cultural heritage and what is missing from these experiences.

The objective of this workshop is to engage with the project’s user communities: cultural institutions and people with disabilities in order to:

• explore and better understand their real experienced needsandexpectations.
• provide the specific requirements and constraints of users to orient the technical development of the project and to create a shared understanding of the user needs!

The partners of the project will participate in the workshop.