Frome Museum AHRC project

We developed these ‘Top Tips’ as we have found partners, museum volunteers and people with learning disabilities and their friends/families expressed a nervousness around visiting museums with people with learning disabilities.  

For museum and heritage staff there is often a fear of saying or doing the wrong thing around disabled people. For the carers and support workers, they may be unsure on what items they are able to touch in a display. These tensions often result in people doing nothing (not visiting a museum or saying hello), or even sometimes overcompensating by giving an over the top and uncomfortable amount of attention to the person with a learning disability.  

In our group discussions, we talked about things like having simple things like simply just saying ‘hello’ and ‘welcome’ to all visitors, having signs saying it is okay to stim here. or even having a recognisable accreditation for supporting people in museums and heritage sites.

This one can make or break people's decisions about whether to visit a museum or heritage site or not. Many small or local museums don’t have things like ramps or accessible toilets, and these are things that can’t always be easily changed, particularly if the museums are older buildings or don’t have big budgets.

So, by being upfront about this information on a website or social media channel, it puts the decision making in the hands of the disabled person. Signposting people to the closest accessible toilets or disabled parking can really help.

Following our consultations with families and organisations for people with learning disabilities, we found that having something ‘hands-on’ or crafty to do came up tops. These were particularly popular choices for people who were non-verbal or with lower levels of literacy skills.  

Family audiences with non-disabled children also expressed a preference for arts and craft activities. So, by becoming more accessible for one audience, museums and heritage sites can also attracting other groups of people.  

Many people access the world in different ways. This can be because of a disability, a health condition, neurodivergence, or simply because we all have different learning styles.

Some people may prefer to read about an object to learn about it, whereas others might need to feel it, hear it, smell it, move it or even really look closely at it!

We found everyone interacts differently in museums, and there was no wrong or right way to process information or engage with museum displays. Some people preferred shorter texts with images and maps to consolidate learning, whereas others wanted to dive in a bit deeper into all of the nitty gritty details and information of an object or display.  

What matters is having information portrayed in a variety of different ways. This means that people can have ownership of their visit, this might be learning and finding out about object through videos, audio descriptions, matching images to objects and texts or simply reading longer text descriptions.

We understand the importance of appealing to different learning styles. We know that different people learn in different ways, some through listening, doing, seeing or reading. For instance, to touch a museum object and feel its texture or to re-enact its use, can be valuable learning experience to many.

Lots of people find it hard to know when they can and can’t touch in a museum. They can be tricky environments to be in. We found a simple green card with a hand symbol and a tick to denote that you can touch felt much more positive than red crosses or lots of ‘do not touch’ signs, which can feel quite negative and authoritative. Consistent and colour-coded signage also helped the participants we worked with. But too many signs can be a bit overwhelming.

We prefer to use just one font throughout our resources and choosing a larger font size such as at least 14. Our project showed that a simple font, without too many curls or elongation, was the simplest to read.

Smaller museums can be rich with knowledge, social histories and stories belonging to local people. We found that although museums represented many historical communities, newer or diverse communities' voices (including those with learning disabilities) were not represented in the collections and displays. When these communities feel represented, they feel welcomed into these spaces.