Museums touch tours for Visually Impaired and Blind increased visits
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| Angel Ayala, left, and Austin Seraphin touch a quartzite likeness of Ramesses II at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Monday Nov. 25, 2013. |
Lately many museums offer facilities for visually impaired. The most common would be magnifying glasses and online audio descriptive tours. At last, blind people have also got the chance to enjoy their visits to certain museums. Museums up until now have been very visual but certain museums arrange scheduled programs or by request, and offer special tours, allowing guests to touch exhibits.They have the opportunity to examine through touch a wide range of objects.
In order to help understand and experience past culture, they use other senses as they feel, touch and in many cases smell objects. Penn Museum in Philadelphia is one of those museums that allow blind visitors to explore by touching. Visitors sanitize their hands before feeling the pieces, which are pre-selected by conservators. When the Overbrook School for the Blind paid a visit to the museum, they had free tours ithat ncluded a classroom lesson on how Egyptians prepared a body for burial. Students jiggled a gelatin mold of the brain — which was removed during the mummification process — and handled facsimiles of relics found in tombs. They also felt ancient linen, smelled scented oils and touched a reproduction of a mummy.Miami Herald reports that the Penn Museum has held hands-on tours twice each Monday — when the building is otherwise closed — for the past two fall seasons. Their effort to make their extensive collections more accessible was indeed successful. Overall, the museum is engaging with nearly 250 blind or visually impaired people this fall, up about 32 percent from last year.
Other Museums offering 'touch tours': Metropolitan Museum
The Penn museum offers special tours for blind visitors, allowing guests to touch exhibits usually off limits.
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