Catharine McNally is an advocate for inclusive museum experiences for people with disabilities. As a deaf art historian and a fan of technology, McNally created an accessible alternative to the audio tour that serves people who are deaf or hard of hearing -- location-based, captioned video tours that can be played from mobile devices. She took this vision and developed Keen Guides to help museums better serve their audiences by offering their tours with captions on mobile, creating inclusive practices for everyone. 

McNally often looks at developing technology and evaluates opportunities to create accessible practices. She spends her time educating organizations and businesses on the value of using technology to create solutions that everyone can use together, which is preferable than creating a separate solution for a "different audience." You can get a glimpse into the types of discussions on the Keen Guides blog, such as how she found Twitter to be an accessibility tool when interpreters are not available. 

McNally is the 2011 recipient of the American Association of People with Disabilities national leadership award, and has recently been named as "People to Watch" in the Washingtonian Magazine's "Tech Titans" list. 

Respondents Catherine McNally and Kate Haley Goldman discuss Claudine Brown's"Access and Inclusivity in the Museum"

>> I'm Kate Haley Goldman from the National  Center of Interactive Learning.  I am Catharine McNally, advocate for inclusive museum experiences for people with disabilities.

>> Great.  Thank you.

>> So one of the thing that is just a couple of words in terms of wrapping together the different presentations we have seen so far today in having the diversity of the different types of institution that is are involved from the art of institutions to the wealth of institutions you deal with.  I see some of the resame relationships ‑‑ we don't have the same pieces in art about the creator and the curator and the visitor we in science institutions which I primarily work with.  We do have the discoverer an the passive recipient and the history of science is very enviewed with the power structure that is you talk about so much in art.  I think you see all of these pieces all the way through in the work that I do and what I do is stem education primarily, science, technology, engineers an math education.  We see the dynamics play out in a couple of our main concerns in terms of pipeline and general scientific literacy.  I say this as background one of the things you struck me with is about these audiences and expectations for THEP and who matters an who doesn't matter and how do we accommodate those.  One of the projects I am currently working on is a face book game on origin space science.  We have had a number of different discoveries in term OFS that is I was struck by how technology perpetwaits power struggles that we have been struggling with for so long in cultural institutions about who matters.  One is why would you go to face book and one was why would you choose older women audiences as your target for this particular game because it's young people who matter in terms of moving forward science literacy, and the gaming does ‑BT necessarily make sense but unexpected audiences, female gamers older female gamers meaning women over 30 are the most prevelant gamers within our society that they gained more than our children and they game more than college men ‑P if you include casual game anything these pieces and there's assumptions about who these audiences are.  We go to face book that's where people who aren't necessarily bought into our agenda.  They are not there for science.  They are not preaching to chior piece.  What struck me in this various audience.  We were very boldly asked why does women matter why is teaching women over 30 about the scientific issues that face our society matter when we could reach other individuals.  It's seen some of the same type of pieces in the accessible projects I work with why does reaching these individuals matter despite that the fact in one in five Americans have disabilities.  We often reach with our projects audiences we didn't know were there within those pieces and so the project I'm working on focuses on how do we change staff attitudes and how do we change staff responses to reaching out and what my long winded way of asking is how are you dealing with this in an organization such as a Smithsonian from an internal practice point of view rather than from an exclusivity view or inclusiveness of your visitors?

>> It's such a long question.  I am going to take a piece of it.  It's interesting because you know as a person who comes from the art museum world when I came to the Smithsonian all people talked was science, technology engineering an math.  And the date of birth of women in sciences.  In my conversations with funders they say we don't want to see any more male scientists we want to see female scientists so they can be role models for young women.  We recently did an interactive role‑playing game called van PHEURB that was a game about the sciences and we partnered with MIT.  It was a role‑playing game that had a mystery and we filmed women scientists talking about their work.  We found them talking about the fact that science is, it's in many ways it's not unlike the creative process we learn from our mistakes.  It's not about perfection and getting it right.  People make mistakes and learn from their mistakes having conversations with some of the scientists here one of them who goes to middle schools a lot these are the two big questions that I'm asked most often.  The first is can you be a scientist and be a mother?  The second is can you be a scientist and be a Christian?  That gives you an idea of how women's careers are being framed.  There are all these kids that think if they want to be mothers then they can't be a scientist.  This notion of who has an authoritative voice the museums had authorititive voices our institutions are considered to be reliable resources, so if women are not seeing in the introductory videos for exhibitions if they are not the people who do the lectures, if they are not the people who do the demonstrations then often there is an assumption that they are not in the mix.  We have to figure out how to raise them up an honor them for the work they do.  The other challenge for me and I think that the Smithsonian in all of it's disciplines is an institution that represents many of the jobs in the future.  The kids who I meet and there's lots of statistics about kids who drop out of school don't know anything about those jobs.  So I think a part of the challenge is helping them to imagine you know, I did a talk to my colleagues at NASA and they said does the office of manage and budget know you are talking about imagination that you think your job is about imagination?  I think that a lot of young people are not pursuing interesting compelling work due to lack of imagination.  If you have in one in your community or in your realm of being who is doing a particular kind of work then it dozen exist for you.  It is a void.  So women WH* are doing powerful interesting, exciting work need to be profiled.  We need to know who they are.  Teachers need to know where they get those clips an they need to be featured in classrooms.  There's a series called art 21 that a lot of teachers are using and teachers have said to me I use today fund that project when I worked with them I think cummings foundation.  I show this film clip of the women artist and the girls in my class they write letters to them.  They didn't know the people existed.  They didn't know it was something you could do for a living.  The messages are so powerful for young women.

>> I just want today follow up on observations from the Brooklyn museum about you had intended to show foreign film to the immigrant audiences.  The turn out for the deaf audiences.  About six years ago I went to a museum with my family and they want today take an audio tour and me being deaf I thought what am I going to do?  I went to the front desk I said hey I'm deaf I want to participate with my family do you have anything to offer me.  They handed me a 50 page transcript.  So I carried this book through the museum.  You know everybody in the gallery had an I pod.  I looked at the I pods I wish I as a deaf person had the use of I pod.  I want today fit in like that.  It dawned on me that I could take the transcript and create A VIDEO and put ton I pod and have an I pod that works for me.  I went to the apple store and I bought an I pod and I went home and tried to record A VIDEO tour with captions and put it on my I pod and walked through the museum the next day and I had an independent experience that was really exciting for me because I fit in whereas before the accommodation made me stand out.  It didn't make me feel like I was part of the museum experience or we forgot about you well here's a 50 page transcript.  So we ran a pilot with about two hundred deaf and hard of people from Gallaudet.  They all loved it.  We expected that but what ‑‑ was a greater number of nondeaf people were coming up to us and say I want to take that I don't want to follow that around or listen to this audio like no offense to those things they wanted something independent.  It kind of shifted my thinking.  The mass community wanted something that's accessible to me in a technology perspective.  What do you think the opportunities within the Smithsonian from a technology perspective that the whole community loves that can also be used as an accessibility purpose for a person with disability?

>> I think we have a lot to learn from you.  I think the theories around universal design say that great design works for everyone and it doesn't isolate a segment of the audience and says this is just for you, but it say that is we have come up with this good solution that works for many people on many levels, so I would love to hear more about what you are doing and I think we would be willing to explore it.

>> I think what I have noticed in the past in my experiences is I really use social media, the community I connect with are on‑line.  My deaf friends are on‑line and that's how I communicate.  I'm really shy.  I am self conscious walking up to someone in the gallery an say what do you think of this painting.  What are they thinking something is wrong with me or wrong with my speech.  I would like to communicate on twitter and face book and have those face books.  What bothers me about the museum experience that using the technology might be frowned upon because I'm not paying attention.  Is there an opportunity to shift that technology can be good and participatory?

>> I was part of a panel with museum professionals from China recently and one of the questions is there too too much technology and are we tired of all the noise and should some of it go away.  I think we need to be smart about how we use it.  I think that I have been in galleries where there's so many videos blasting at one time that you can't hear any of them.  A part of what will allow us to do what we do better is to talk to our constituent SEUs to find out what is working and have some time to test things out with lots of different kinds of people so we are better informed about the products we make.

>> Do we have time?

>> I am getting caught up on in the conversation.  Take three or four minutes.

>> Building on my comments and thoughts from you.  For me one of the things in the most recent proposal.  I am working with the museum in Boston on creating multi media for everyone.  We find that so much the barrier is not the devices respect available and the the roots are not available but there are some of the things holding us back and partly it's that we don't know about what to do and partly when we query museum professional it is barrier is internal.  Years ago, two years ago when I was judging for museums on the web we made a VOW that we wouldn't accept any website that was not accessible.  We had to step aside from that we didn't have any submitted we only had one or two.  It exists right?  It's out there we could make it accessible and yet we do not.  In preparing for this proposal we looked at what are the barriers.  They were internal people would say on the surface they were committed to making things accessible but they felt it was too expensive, too time consuming and too this and we are not working in partnership with groups to make things truly accessible.  One of the things I am interested in is do you struggle with this from an internal perspective, from a staff perspective of how do we change our own vision of the world to make our projects more accessible.  In the end it's not time or money that keeps us back.

>> I think we have to share more.  You know one we good models out there.  If people don't see good models they don't know what's possible.  What we need to share are budgets an consultants that help us, so that people who think they have these impediments can go to specialists who will help them solve the problems and if we don't put the models up and if we don't put them up in detail then people continue to create barriers for themselves that need not exist.

>> Katherine:  Your comment about creating limitations really stood out to me.  I think museums think owe my gosh accessibilities will cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars when in reality it doesn't.  There's a lot out there that we can RETRO fit to work for accessibility purposes.

>> Just like you created an opportunity for yourself we certainly could open ourselves up to have people submit solutions that will work for themselves an others.

>> I think offering that range of options is really valuable.  I don't know American sign language so when you think we have American sign language we are done.  That's not helping me or an aging baby boomer with a hearing loss.  I think there's other things to consider.

>> Thank you for all of your work.