Audio guides and Accessibility mode for people with disabilities.
Symbols project is aimed at providing improvements for people with disabilities and make it easier for them to discover cultural heritage as well.
Team of ARTOUR, which provides the mobile app and data platform for the project, approached this with much enthusiasm. One of first steps was to actually have a meeting at the cemetery with blind person to get to feel the most extreme version of visual disability.
After the meeting and other conversations, team decided to start improvements in 2 ways:
With this feature a user can play the audio of the text in the app if available. For English texts the audio is automatically created by the system, thus all Symbols guides in English have this available.
With this feature, users with visual disabilities will have a very differently designed app available. Text with high contrast and big buttons help them navigate and read content more easily.
In the future, ARTOUR team plans on enhancing the navigation systems by implementing beacons technology were available.