Inclusivity and Accessibility to Visually Impaired Audiences to Audiovisual Collections and Museums

We live in a visual world. Images are everywhere, especially in museums, where visuality is key. When it comes to moving images, the visual aspect of the material is even greater since the first contact with it offered to the observer is through sight. So does it mean that visually impaired audiences are doomed to not have a consistent access to video content, which means not being able to have a deeper understanding of what's being shown through the moving images? Blind people or people that have low vision live in the same world as everybody else. Consequently, they do have constant contact with kinetic audiovisual content living in this society. It is time, then, to start taking this group into consideration when it comes to audiovisual cultural heritage. This paper shows the evolution of a project destined to find non-visual multi-sensory solutions to cognitive access to video content. Through the initiative of Making Sense, a case study involving a series of workshops put into practice at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, it analyses the process of conception, organization, practice and reflection over the findings of an eight month participatory research.