Towards Reliable Accessibility Assessments of Science Center Exhibits

A methodology for assessing the degree of accessibility of museum and science center exhibits is proposed in this work. It consists of an exhibit-centric framework with a corresponding score for the accessibility indicators vision, hearing, mobility, motor, and cognition. The scores are achieved by combining the results of an observational study with a supplementary expert evaluation for high reliability. The methodology was successfully applied with pupils in an informal-learning context at Oslo Science Center. We believe it has relevance for and can be applied to other areas such as self-service machines and interactive technical artifacts in general due to its generic nature.