Museum accessibility experiences

We were looking for new things to do over the Christmas break when I came across a leaflet for a new museum in Bilbao, looking at the historical development of the estuary, and we decided to give it a go. My grandmother can walk but gets increasingly tired if on her own pegs for an extended period of time, so these days we try to sort out a wheelchair for airports, museums and similar marathons. There was no information in the leaflet about accessibility. The leaflet had a URL for the museum's website, which proved to be incorrect. I finally tracked the true website address down through Google: this too had no information whatsoever about accessibility. We tried calling by phone quite a few times: nobody ever picked it up. So we finally took the risk, despite the museum being a half-hour train ride away.

The three of us are well-acquainted with the streets of Bilbao, but it proved impossible to find any street signs for the new museum. Nor could any passers-by help, until we finally came across someone who had been to the museum's inauguration. We finally made it to the front door, and yes, the museum is accessible for wheelchair users, and yes, they even had a brand new wheelchair, factory fresh, for the use of visitors. None of the desk staff knew how to get the seat open, so we spent some time fiddling around. Nevermind, we were on our way.

We then spent an hour or two trying to figure out ways of helping my grandmother to 'access' the exhibits from the vantage point of her spanking new wheelchair. While a lift at each end of the building allowed wheelchair users to access each floor, the exhibits themselves were often problematic: large blocks of black text on a dark brown background starting at standing head height or above and reaching up several metres; small objects recessed in enclosed opaque boxes at - adult - head height and tilted towards the ceiling, rendering them completely invisible to all but average height adults; extracts of documents in poorly contrasting colours, once again recessed in enclosures; wheelchair users forced to park in a busy thoroughfare to view a film giving a background to the museum and its exhibits, with visitors constantly passing in front of the screen and so blacking it out.

Unlike many wheelchair users, my grandmother is able to get up and walk, but she would have had to behave like a jack-in-the-box to properly view the exhibits, and it's a performance to constantly get in and out of a wheelchair when you're 87 and not exactly sprightly. This would in any case have defeated the whole purpose of her being in the chair. So we ended up reading out the highlights to her as we moved around, thus disturbing other visitors, as her hearing is none too good.

I know many older museums suffer from similar problems, but the new museum in Bilbao is only a few months old. I wonder whether any of the exhibition designers considered what a museum looks like, feels like, when you're seven years old, or in a wheelchair, or - as most of us are - suffering from deteriorating vision.