Caring and Harmful Practice
These lists have grown out of many conversations on our experiences from visiting art institutions. Here they are presented in a condensed, non-conclusive format that is indented to be reflected upon and modified when applied within different groups, sensitivities and contexts.
Caring Practices
Physical Comfort and Rest
-Provide seating throughout exhibitions, workshops, and event spaces, allowing visitors to rest and engage with the programme from a seated position.
-Offer comfortable chairs with back support.
-Create designated rest areas and low-sensory spaces.
-Ensure access to free drinking water, affordable refreshments, and hot drinks.
-Provide practical amenities that support visitors’ needs, such as accessible restrooms, period products, and power outlets for assistive devices or medical equipment. Accessible Information and
Communication
-Present information in multiple formats, including concise summaries alongside longer or more theoretical texts.
-Use plain language, readable font sizes, and accessible visual design.
-Provide audio descriptions, audio guides, captions, and other alternative formats without requiring visitors to use their own devices.
-Make accessibility information easy to find on websites and in physical spaces.
-Clearly communicate available accessibility services, facilities, and points of contact before and during visits.
-Ensure staff are knowledgeable about accessibility and able to answer questions respectfully and accurately.
Physical Accessibility and Navigation
-Clearly mark steps, level changes, obstacles, and restricted areas using high-contrast visual cues.
-Ensure routes, exits, and emergency procedures are clearly visible and easy to navigate.
-Provide open and clearly marked exit paths, including the possibility of leaving events early when needed.
-Make doors, entrances, and circulation spaces easy to access and use independently.
-Ensure exhibition spaces are spacious enough to reduce crowding, noise, and unnecessary sensory overload.
Access to Artworks and Programmes
-Allow visitors to engage with artworks in ways that support their access needs, including approaching works closely where appropriate.
-Provide tactile experiences, replicas, outlines, or touchable objects whenever possible.
-Ensure artworks can be experienced from multiple perspectives and distances.
-Allow photography when it supports accessibility and engagement.
-Provide accessibility tickets, companion tickets, and other access-related services through the same booking systems used by other visitors.
Inclusive and Supportive Environments
-Ensure visitors can ask for assistance without being questioned, judged, or required to justify their needs.
-Offer access to trained staff or designated accessibility contacts.
-Welcome visitors with different disabilities, access requirements, and support needs without requiring additional documentation beyond what is necessary.
-Create environments where visitors feel respected, included, and able to participate on equal terms.
-Acknowledge and credit the full range of contributors involved in exhibitions, events, and programmes.
Sensory Considerations
-Provide noise cancelling equipment and sensory maps.
-Provide balanced lighting that supports visibility without creating discomfort through excessive brightness or darkness.
-Minimize unnecessary glare, reflections, and visual barriers.
-Offer fragrance-free facilities where possible.
-Include visible clocks and other orientation tools during talks, lectures, and events.
Harmful Practices
Physical and Sensory Barriers
-Providing insufficient seating or seating that is uncomfortable and lacks back support.
-Designing spaces that prioritise aesthetics over accessibility and comfort.
-Using lighting that is excessively bright, dark, or creates glare and reflections that make artworks difficult to perceive.
-Creating crowded, noisy, or overstimulating environments without offering quieter alternatives.
-Installing heavy doors, inaccessible entrances, or other physical barriers.
-Failing to provide low-sensory spaces or opportunities for rest.
Inaccessible Information and Communication
-Presenting information only through long, complex texts, small typography, or academic language.
-Providing accessibility information that is incomplete, difficult to find, or focused on only a narrow range of disabilities.
-Requiring visitors to make additional phone calls, emails, or special requests in order to access information or services that could be available through standard systems.
-Failing to provide captions, audio information, or alternative formats.
Exclusionary Access Practices
-Requiring visitors to prove, explain, or justify their disability in order to access accommodations.
Restricting companion tickets, discounts, or support services to specific disability categories while excluding others with equivalent support needs.
-Refusing access to visitors who have legitimately booked accessibility services.
-Treating requests for assistance as inconveniences rather than part of institutional responsibility.
Barriers to Experiencing Art
-Displaying artworks in ways that prevent meaningful access, such as placing works too far away, too high, or behind visual obstacles.
-Preventing visitors from using reasonable access strategies, such as moving closer to artworks or taking photographs where these support access needs.
-Creating restrictions that prioritise institutional concerns over equitable participation without providing alternative access solutions.
-Failing to provide tactile, audio, or other accessible forms of engagement when visual access alone is insufficient.
Lack of Respect and Understanding
-Responding to requests for assistance with judgment, scepticism, or unnecessary questioning.
-Assuming what visitors can or cannot do instead of listening to their stated needs.
-Monitoring or correcting disabled visitors in ways that undermine their autonomy and expertise regarding their own access requirements.
-Expecting visitors to navigate inaccessible environments without support.
Tokenistic or Uneven Approaches to Care
-Unwillingness by curators to engage with harmful material within the museum collections and archives to challenge difficult histories, and unwillingness to include disabled perspectives to examine these histories.
-Representing of disability without involving disabled people.
-Representation of disability that relies on stereotypes rather than everyday realities and a framework of legitimate knowledge production.
-Applying content warnings selectively in ways that centre the comfort of non-disabled audiences while overlooking potentially harmful or triggering content for disabled visitors.
-Treating accessibility as an add-on rather than an integral part of exhibition, event, and programme design.
To Be Expected – An Audience Perspective
I remember the first time that I could no longer access an art exhibition. I was at Louisiana with my family to see the Arthur Jafa show. I had, during the previous year, developed a handful of strange symptoms in my eyes, that my optician and eye doctors were struggling to understand. I was seeing double all the time, had near constant visual disturbances, my eye muscles and lenses were in spasms pretty much every minute of every day. Sometimes the visual disturbances were so vivid, that the whole world disappeared into flickering white static. Other times everything was shaking back and forth or blinking as a stroboscope light. It was as if the connection between my eyes and my brain had been severed and no one seemed to know why. Most of the time my eyes hurt too much to be of any functional use. I had just stopped being able to read and use a computer in a normal way, but I was still hopeful that enough surgery and medication would give me my functioning vision back. I had a feeling that this was a strange period of my life, something to withstand and make it through. Five years later, I know this was not the case. I also know, that gaining a disability might be the hardest thing I have tried, but also a gateway to a new world of understanding and a persistent and stubborn need for making the world more accessible, not just for people like myself, but disabled people in all shapes and forms.
During the Arthur Jafa show I remember trying to hold on. I was a film maker at the time, just about to finish my education at the National Danish Film School. Visual art has always been the place, that I found the most inspiration and solace. I had just come out of a year long film production of an experimental Dracula film, where we tried to recreate the dark blurry shapes of Francis Bacon’s triptychs, by adjusting the shutter speed on the camera. My first year, film had been heavily influenced by the video work of Pipilotti Rist. I was hardly very original in my taste, but loved the feeling of being able to swallow the whole world visually, of going in the footsteps of someone who had been pursuing their aesthetic curiosity before me. Now I was struggling to make my eyes work at the Jafa show. I remember seeing his masterpiece “Love is the message, the message is Death” (2017), and how much the flickering images hurt my eyes. I tried to hold on, to force myself not to look away. I remember feeling the urgency and importance of the work and wanting to engage with it wholeheartedly. The further we got, the worse the pain got. In the end I squeezed my eyes shut, and I know that I missed almost everything beautiful, strong, and important about Jafa’s art that day. At the time it made me feel ashamed. I wanted to power through, to be able to read the flickering ants of texts that were on the museum walls. I wanted to scan the room and understand the atmosphere of the curation. I wanted to be able to engage with the art in a way, that felt like I was showing respect to the artist’s intentions. Instead, I ended up staggering around, clutching the arms of various family members with my eyes shut and a pounding headache on the way. It felt like a defeat. I didn’t go to another art museum for years after that. Eventually something started to shift. I was going through the painful process of trying out new treatments and surgeries, none of which had any real effect. The doctors rearranged my eye muscles, shut off my right eye, paralyzed my pupils and started pulling out my eye muscles and injecting them with botox every three months. My vision was clear on one eye if I was standing right in front of the object, but my eyes were constantly spasming and hurting almost all the time. I have ended up with something, that is a good enough vision to recognize the person I am talking to, but with too many spasms and disturbances to be able to read, see further than a few meters ahead for longer than a minute, or orient myself well in new spaces. My eyes are always running on 2% battery power and making it through a whole day, even with screen readers and assistance, usually renders my eyes completely broken down by night time. Therefore, visual art is a luxury good, that I rarely have the capacity for. Still, I yearn for it. I choose my vacations on where the most interesting art can be found. I keep myself up to date with everything going on in my city’s art world and I have started to stubbornly show up.
After I started identifying as a person with a vision impairment, instead of just a “person with eye problems that are probably, maybe going to be fixed one day”, I have started asking for accommodations at art institutions. It has almost become a kind of experiment for me. I find that art institutions in other European cities are very imaginative. I have been handed a large print program, been allowed to touch objects and have tried audio guided descriptions of the work. My favorite was a show in Vienna, where the artist also audio described pieces of work, that were no longer at display. It felt like a secret extra ingredient, just for me. The preferences in audio description will vary wildly from person to person. I love when the audio description is made by the artist and is creative and exciting in its own way. I love when it is mixed with poetry and is emotionally charged. I want to hear about the atmosphere created by the cuts and colors. I want to know the emotion of the movements in a video piece. Those things matter much more to me, than the color of someone’s dress or the exact content of the background in a painting. Some people prefer an audio description to be a lot more objective, to be able to draw their own conclusions. As it turns out, visually impaired folks are all exactly as different in taste and preferences as everyone else.
I think that paving a way forward for the involvement of visually impaired people as audience in the art world, is not only necessary and democratically important, I also think it is going to make art institutions better. In her excellent book There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, the writer and scholar Leona Godin calls the world that we live in ocularcentric. I think by shutting your eyes and leaning into the other senses as both an artist and a curator, you can expand your perception of art and the world. I think we could widen the reach and capacity of art institutions by making them a place, where everyone might not have the same experience, but everyone should be able to have some intentional experiences. In the end, for me, it is a matter of being an expected audience member in a space – if an art institution already has audio description in its audio guide, if the institution has large printed or braille programs, if I would be able to get close or even touch the art work without setting off the alarm, if there were tactile guidelines in museums, to make sure that visually impaired visitors, do not bump into a sculpture or other precious work. That would make me feel, that no matter the state of my vision, I was welcome as a guest, and maybe, instead of this feeling of shame and anxiety, I could feel welcome, excited and curious to visit art institutions again.
-Personal contribution by Tone Ottilie Frederiksen
Five Concrete Actions for Art Institutions
1) Free entrance, affordable entrance, sliding scale prices or reduced entrance without having to prove low-income, age, or “official” disability.
2) Resting space, nap space, free water, recharge stations.
3) Making guests feel welcome and safe.
4) Communication clearly. Wording that is too academic closes doors for many visitors.
5) No mass-disabling activities such as engagement with oil and weapon production, collaboration or being tied to colonial and genocidal powers.
