Museum Accessibility for Visitors with Disabilities. InTRAlinea, Special Issue

This special issue is a continuation of the volume Media Accessibility for Deaf and Blind Audiences (Eugeni & Valero-Gisbert 2025: https://www.intralinea.org/specials/media_accessibility). It presents a selection of ten double-blind peer-reviewed contributions from the International Conference on Accessible Intersemiotic Translation (ICAIT), held in Parma on 31 March and 1 April 2022, and brings together a series of studies that mainly focus on accessibility in a museum context. As is widely acknowledged, culture is a fundamental affirmed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), a right that naturally extends to all individuals. The Convention institutionalises the notion of cultural accessibility, understood as the consideration of diverse human needs, whether motor, sensory (e.g., deafness, blindness), intellectual, and psychosocial. In this framework, and thanks to the rapid development of new technologies, a wide range of tools, services, and strategies has been developed to identify and overcome the barriers that prevent people in these conditions from accessing cultural content and fully participating in cultural life. The studies presented in this issue illustrate, on one hand, the progress of research in the field of accessibility through the integration of recent technological innovations; on the other hand, they show how this progress translates into a transformation of cultural spaces through a variety of experimental approaches, be they linguistic using figures of speech in enhanced audio description and textual simplifications facilitating comprehension; or multisensory, which significantly challenge the standard approach to accessibility while also offering social value that benefits not only individuals with specific access needs but also the general public. The issue is organised into four thematic sections: Introductory Reflections; Accessibility for Blind Visitors; Accessibility for Visitors with Reading Difficulties; and Accessibility for Deaf Visitors.