Dear All

You may recall that I forwarded the original enquiry to this list - here's a summary from Susannah of the responses she received.

Best wishes

John 

-----Original Message-----
From: Archivists, conservators and records managers. <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Susannah Coster
Sent: Wednesday, November 1, 2023 2:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Responses to Accessibility for visitors with a visual impairment query

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you very much again to all of you who replied to my question on 14 October about accessibility in reading rooms for visitors with a visual impairment. The replies were so useful, giving specific examples of resources being used, and will help us to develop our resources for the reading room at The Postal Museum. 

As promised, I've collated the replies to share with you all below:

•	A county record office has a cctv scanner machine, purchased after carrying out an accessibility audit and liaising with the local sight support charity to ascertain what would be most useful. They thoroughly suggest working with a specialist organisation as it took the guess work and assumption by our non-sight impaired staff out of the equation and gave them the right information about different visual impairment conditions, so it’s not just about magnification but also  background colour, contrast, and providing underlining for conditions such as macular degeneration and nystagmus. There are limits with the machines in terms of the size of the document you can place on the magnification plate, and it’s better to use a flexible support like a bean bag cushion for bound items.
They also use magnifying glasses and allow visually impaired customers to take photographs with an ipad or tablet so that they can enlarge the image on the screen to make it more accessible for them. Digitising material, within reason, so that a customer could use an enlarged digital copy on one of the search room computers, or give them free access to already digitised material, is a possibility, though to their knowledge they have never been asked for this.

•	A local government archive offers a magnifying screen, and also magnifying lamps.

•	Another local government archive offers a range of handheld magnifiers, and an LG Visio cctv reader. Although it's an older model (c.20 years old), it's really useful not only for people with a visually impairment, but for people with other print impairments such as dyslexia: you can change the contrast, background and text colour through several variations. Theirs is a stand-alone version, but you can get them to integrate with pcs/laptops. This is an example of an up-to-date model: https://www.visiobraille.de/index.php?article_id=32&clang=2 

•	Colleagues might also be interested in the response from The National Archives who I contacted separately: In addition to this page: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/visit-us/information-for-disabled-visitors/visit-us-site-facilities-and-accessibility/ 
they said: ‘We provide magnifying glasses in the reading room on request, although readers are also welcome to bring their own. We don't have any relevant additional technologies available which aren't covered on our website.
Electronic document magnifiers which directly touch or illuminate documents can’t be used with our archival collections for preservation reasons. They can, however, be used with books from our library collection, publications and indexes.
USB cameras with integral stands of up to 60cm are permitted in the document reading rooms, and while any integral light source or flash function needs to be deactivated, a magnifier which functioned in the same way would also be welcome.
Unfortunately our level of resource means that we're not in a position to offer one to one support to users with visual impairments, and we advise visitors with little or no sight to bring an assistant who can read or take photographs of documents.’

With best wishes,

Susannah

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