AT in museums allow them to encourage prospective visitors suffering from various disabilities to become real visitors. It is of utmost importance for museums to be equipped with AT which ideally should be designed together with the target groups and tailored to the precise needs hereof.
Benefits include:
- Higher satisfaction rate of impaired visitors
- Increased visit frequency for the impaired visitors
- Increased visibility of the museum in the local community
- Breaking harmful stereotypes and raising community awareness of the vulnerable people’s needs
Compliance with SDG 4, 10, 17: Quality Education, Reduced Inequalities, Partnerships for the Goals – Once both management and staff acquire the due information about the sustainable development goals, which are not necessarily common knowledge in the cultural field, but rather something heard of from the news, then the identification of the SDGs applicable to the cultural heritage and compliance thereto can and should become part of the institutional strategy for the short- and medium- term development. SDG 4 refers to Quality Education, and when saying education one should not strictly think of the formal educational process taking place in schools, in general, from kinder gardens to universities but of the lifelong education, to the process that takes place during one’s adult life, after completing their formal of formal training, as it is known that knowledge acquisition happens throughout one’s entire lifespan, that is in informal contexts, among which museums. SDG 10 referring to Reduced Inequalities needs to be applied in cultural organizations, which are often located in historical buildings, which makes access more difficult, so particular care should be taken to avoid inequal access and reduce to the minimum the occurrences hereof. Finally, SDG 17, Partnership for the Goals, is a very useful concept for the cultural world, where a lot of actions take place in partnerships and which could be perfect partners for the dissemination of information about the goals, particularly in countries where society in general may face bigger problems like poverty or diseases and therefore knowledge about the goals might be somehow left aside. The communicative role of museums is very useful from this perspective.