Travelling can be a complicated experience when you have combined hearing loss and low vision. In particular, going to galleries, museums and exhibitions can often be an excluding experience: not enough accessible information, few visual descriptions, scarce large print materials and frequently, noisy, crowded surrounds. Sometimes I trail behind my husband feeling bored. Sometimes I drink tea in the café or stay in my hotel room or apartment. Either way, this is not the stuff of happy holiday memories.
In March, I decided to do things differently on a work trip to London. There must be a way to do both entertain the sighted-hearing partner as well as provided a good experience for a deafblind person. Before leaving Australia , I emailed the British Museum and asked what they provided for visitors with disability.
The British Museum Access Team responded suggesting their ‘Touch Tours’. I immediately replied booking the Ancient Egypt tour and the Ancient Greece Parthenon one. These tours — led by trained, enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteers — must be booked in advance. Advance planning is also advisable for getting to the museum (which is free to enter except for special exhibitions and events). The queues can be long, long, long. We suggest going around the back entrance and alerting the security guards who will let you in near the rear lifts — so no need to line up Just tell them you are doing a touch tour for people with disability.
We also booked both tours on different days (Thursday and Sunday) as we recognised how tiring concentrating on getting as much information as possible would be. We found forty-five minutes to one hour to be the perfect length. We also booked ten am tours so that the museum might be less crowded — queues stretched over two blocks when we exited.
First we ‘went’ to Ancient Greece. We used speech to text on my iPhone to help with receiving information — but this won’t work for everyone. My husband could fingerspell key words to contextualise what I was sort of seeing on the phone. There is a model of the Parthenon — this is a grand marble temple built in the fifth century BC in Athens. It had a large ‘river of marble’ in the upper part, with carvings showing not only gods and goddesses, but also scenes of everyday lift in Ancient Greece. I got to feel the outside of the temple and this helped me understand where the river of marble was located and how massive these sculptures and carvings must be in real life dimensions. You can also touch inside the model to get a sense of the layout and symmetry and the columns.
Since the Earl of Elgin took plaster casts of many of the marble panels, visitors on the touch tours can feel these without risk of damaging the precious originals. The section we focused on depicted horses and the young men who looked after them. The horses are indeed magnificent; some being ridden by athletic men. Both myself and my husband enjoyed the time spent in Ancient Athens with our guide — demonstrating the tours are not ‘just’ for those with a disability.
We returned on the Sunday to go to Ancient Egypt during the reign of Amenhotep the Third mainly. We had a different guide who has been doing these tours for a long time. He explained how the large statues weighing thousands of tonnes were transporte and why they nearly all had lost their noses (fragile bits of stone are easy to knock or break off). There are nose-less lions, scarab beetles and Amenhotep’s statue with no nose and a restored mid-section. You can feel all these genuine objects.
You can also touch a copy of the Rosetta Stone and the detail is exceptionally good. I had never realised that the way the birds pointed told you the direction to read in (e.g bird’s beak pointing left, you read from right to left). I also never knew that a ‘cartouche’ was an oval hieroglyph that contained the sacred name of the sovereign. You can feel this on the stone (and also in other statues and carvings in the museum).
These were exciting and inclusive activities. So much so we wanted to see if other places would rise to the challenge. Windsor Castle did, in each room , there are ‘touch’ items that the staff can bring out for those who are vision impaired or deafblind. We felt things like glass drops from chandeliers , a piece of embroidered carpet and most excitingly, a piece of burnt fifteenth century panelling that was damaged in the fire at Windsor castle in 1992.
At Hampton Court Palace, Henry the Eighth’s main stomping ground, we booked a guide Sarah. The guide, who used to work at the palace, focused on the tactile elements of the rooms and furnishings. She asked the actors dressed up in Tudor costume if we could feel the embroidery on the back or the ruffles on sleeves. We felt kitchenware, sat in the King Henry and Queen Anne Boleyn chairs in their dining room and wandered the famous maze (not getting lost either).
So my message is: plan your trips away, email museums, galleries and guides asking what they can provide. Tactile adventures are different to those that the sighted-hearing might go on, but they are still fun and informative.
Contact details
British museum : access@britishmuseum.org
Windsor Castle (and other Royal collections): access@rct.uk
Hampton Court Palace Private tour with accredited guide – 160 Pounds for 2 hours: https://www.tripadvisor.com/AttractionProductReview-g504169-d23693580-Hampton_Court_Palace_private_tour_with_an_accredited_expert_guide-East_Molesey_Mol.html