Make all visitors feel welcome with mobile features.

As you may know by now, our mission at Encurate is to help you become your visitors’ favorite destination. And to do that, it’s important to make all of your visitors feel welcome when they come to your space.

This means considering visitors of all abilities, visitors with different needs for vision and hearing, and visitors who speak different languages, just to name a few. This is where you can turn to technology as a tool to provide different ways of access to your content. And in doing so, you can contribute to the cultural transformation in the way society thinks about disability and inclusion.

With a mobile app, you are able to create tours specifically for those visitors who have varying degrees of needs. When designing the app and tours, you're able to put yourself in the shoes of each individual coming to your space, and ask yourself: Is everyone able to experience this? What will their visit look like?

Consider visitors with varying degrees of sight, ask what kind of descriptive audio will help them “see” the artifacts or artwork.

Consider visitors with varying degrees of hearing, ask what visuals or written content will tell the best story.

Do you have a room that's only accessible through a steep, narrow staircase or a small hallway? Add images of that room and it's content to your app so people who aren't comfortable getting there can still take a look.

You can also create tours that feature areas with low light and sound for visitors easily affected by this, and offer your visitors an app with features like text-to-speak and customized font size.

Another thing you may want to consider is where your visitors are coming from and what languages they speak. Luckily, this can be easily determined thanks to the analytics provided by the app. From there, you can translate your content, and provide it to you visitors in their native language.

These are just a few examples of making your space more accessible with a mobile app. What other features can you think of to help make your space more accessible?

When we look at our spaces, or the objects that are featured, we need to think about how people are exploring from every perspective and what each unique person is dealing with. This will help us to challenge the way we think about disability and inclusion, and look at an app as an opportunity to address various needs.

Cultural destinations exist to tell stories - you want to make sure all visitors are hearing them, whether that’s through audio, video, multiple languages, written content, or photos. Our goal is for all cultural destinations to remove barriers by using a mobile app as an extension of your space to welcome all of your unique visitors.