It took a trip to a museum to convince Catharine McNally that something needed to be done.
She was given a fifty-page script in exchange for their audio tour. Discouraged but not deterred, McNally went home that night with the idea to transcribe the script into cued speech on her video iPod. She went back to the museum the next day and showed them what she had done.
The museum loved what she did. They told her the problem they had with her idea: no one was doing it. This whole experience gave Catharine McNally the idea to start Keen Guides.
My wife was one of the few people who pilot-tested the new system that McNally and her partners developed at the National Gallery of Art last summer. She came home all excited about being able to actually "see" what the audio tour would have said otherwise and was excited at the prospect that she could possibly in the near future visit museums across the country with a Keen Guide iPod device in hand, enjoying the exhibits to the fullest.
NcNally grew up in North Carolina and graduated from Wake Forest. Deaf since the age of eight months and sporting bilateral cochlear implants, McNally has used cued speech since she became deaf and is now learning ASL. Her experience that day at the museum gave her the inspiration she needed to make sure other deaf and hard of hearing people have full access to museum exhibitions.
"At the core of our product, we create adaptations of each tour for those with sensory and mental disabilities - such as deafness, blindness, and dementia," McNally explained in an e-mail interview. "The result [of this endeavor] is an experience that is mainstream, inclusive, and engaging for everyone."
McNally and her partners won two business plan competitions earlier this year, one from Georgetown University and the other from Wake Forest. These competitions gave Keen Guides fifty thousand dollars to help get the company up and running.
With the capital in hand, McNally has already dreamed small and is now dreaming big. "[We want] to get our products into several key cultural institutions to demonstrate the broad applicability of our product by early spring 2009," explained McNally.
She feels that the Keen Guides can be used as a marketing tool to attract more deaf and hard of hearing people to unusual places or those previously out of reach such as "National Parks and historic markers, as a service that increases accessibility of a collection to a broader audience in all areas, large or small in size."
One thing McNally foresees is the demand from museums may not be high right now. "Currently, museums don't think that there's a demand from the deaf population for museum access, when in reality, it's because we know that the current solutions of a transcript or a 2-3 week waiting period for an interpreter is not appealing."
McNally hopes to be able to work around this potential problem and get museums to accept this solution for deaf and hard of hearing visitors. She and her partners are currently working to place their products in all types of cultural institutions such as zoos, national parks, colleges/universities, aquariums, science museums, art galleries, historic homes, and city walking tours to name a few.
"We are not focusing on one central region, but are taking advantage of what's in our backyard: all the free museums, national parks, and historic sites around Washington, D.C.!" exclaimed McNally.
The pilot testing stage that occurred in February and September of this year resulted in an 85% overall satisfaction rating. Out of 190 patrons who experimented using the Keen Guides in cued speech, spoken English, captioned, and ASL, 52% had experienced prior intimidation by the lack of accessibility options, and were pleased to actually experience the options provided by using a Keen Guide.
"Students in school groups attending the museum found the use of an iPod to take a museum tour, as well as the independence of Keen Guides, to be quite appealing," said McNally.
In fact, McNally suspects the Keen Guides will actually help another population demographic: aging baby boomers.
"[They] are losing their hearing at an increasing rate and will not necessarily know ASL, so they are currently left out of the museum experience."
The Keen Guides website at www.keenguides.org offers information about how to get your local museum involved as well as free downloads of the tours as shown in the National Gallery of Art. The website also has a blog.
McNally knows that in order to thrive, she needs to keep working. They've already targeted issues they need to work on with the current products. She explained that some people have asked to add captions to the ASL tour and to provide directional markers or an online map of the museum so people know where to go to next for the next exhibition. These are small things in comparison to the bigger picture of how to get the products out into museums.
To McNally, nothing would be better for her to one day see people in museums using Keen Guides.
And that is definitely a keen idea!
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