It’s Museum Week 2023 and in celebration of all our wonderful museums and exhibition spaces across the UK, we’re offering an opportunity for a venue to make a tour accessible to their deaf, deafened and hard of hearing visitors.
We’re looking for a museum or exhibition space that already runs public tours of their collections or exhibitions, who would like the opportunity to make their tours accessible through remote speech-to-text reporting. The winning venue will get a free live subtitled tour, and Stagetext will help you promote your event to deaf people in your area.
What are live subtitles and how can they help your venue?
Live subtitles are verbatim subtitles, produced in real-time as your tour guide speaks. They are produced remotely by a trained Speech-To-Text-Reporter (STTR) but they appear on devices your visitors hold, meaning they are on the tour, learning the about the collection and looking at the exhibits along with everyone else.
Why is this a great opportunity for your venue?
There are 12 million people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing in the UK. This means one in five people visiting your museum may not be able to take part in your tours, so this is a chance for your deaf visitors to experience everything your museum has to offer. In fact, live subtitles are beneficial to lots of other people too, so including them means more and more people can enjoy your museum’s work.
Sound good? Then here’s what we need from you.
Please complete the survey, telling us about your museum and your tours, these must be conducted indoors. We also need some information about the wifi signal in the spaces the tour will be conducted. If your venue is successful, our Live Subtitling Programme Manager, Courtney Rudge, will help you with all the technical setup and planning.
Courtney told us, ‘I want to help our wonderful museums get more and more people back through their doors and creating access is a great way to do this. With such a big audience missing out on tours, we want to help a museum offer their deaf visitors equal access.’
The deadline to apply is 30 June 2023, after which we will contact the successful museum.
Find out more about live subtitles for tours and talks.
