KNOWLEDGE DISSEMINATION

Museums play a crucial role in society by educating the public and representing diverse aspects of culture through their exhibits. Therefore, it is imperative to render museums accessible to the largest audience and initiatives that reduce cultural exclusion of people living with disabilities are highly recommended and encouraged. Today, the utilisation of ICT, foster social inclusion and allow cultural heritage context to become more accessible physically and intellectually. In particular, the accessibility of museum collections by the visually impaired (VI) is a very active multidisciplinary research domain. Actually, haptic prohibition is one of the most common limitations when interacting with museum artefacts. This restriction aims quite logically at preventing damages while safeguarding the integrity of the cultural reserve, characterised by its uniqueness. Nevertheless, if museum visitors are visually impaired, the inability to touch the artefacts makes the whole experience incomplete as the haptic perception of an artefact’s morphology is the primary substitute of sight. ICT may play a significant role in providing assistive methods that enable individuals to access museums’ reserve through multimodal approaches that are not limited to the actual premises of a museum. The elimination of the ”Do not touch” ban in conjunction with on-demand narrative enrichment triggers the general interest and initiates a further involvement in comprehending the cultural and historical background encapsulated by exhibits.