Co-design of a voice-driven interactive smart guide for museum accessibility and management

This paper describes the process of co-designing and creating a voice-driven interactive smart audio descriptive guide for Titanic Belfast, a world-leading tourist attraction. This smart audio descriptive guide is intended to enhance museum accessibility and visitor experience, especially for blind and partially sighted (BPS) visitors. A key research question is to explore to what extent museums can conveniently produce their own smart guide to enrich the visitor experience for BPS visitors.

The paper first outlines the necessarily complex set of team functional roles and users in designing the smart audio descriptive guide and then presents the main challenges and opportunities arising from the key user requirements from both BPS visitor and the Museum Management perspectives. The main design features of the smart audio descriptive guide, which address these requirements, are then described.

The paper then outlines the main findings of our evaluative review of the smart guide with a group of BPS participants and from a Museum Management perspective. One of the key benefits of our approach is that the smart audio descriptive guide has the potential to offer museums and cultural venues a new, affordable approach to providing and maintaining a high-quality accessibility experience with lower design effort than traditional audio descriptive guide approaches.