PNRR Funding for Museum Accessibility

Inclusivity and accessibility are increasingly important topics that still need a lot of awareness-raising.

In the museum world, this has led to an effort to increase visitor numbers at small and medium-sized museums by making them easily accessible to people with disabilities.

As part of the PNRR (Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan), the Italian Ministry of Culture has launched two calls for proposals aimed at removing physical, cognitive and sensory barriers in public and private museums and cultural sites.

Projects must be submitted by 12:00 noon on August 12 and must demonstrate the operational feasibility of the proposed strategy.

Specifically, the strategy must address the visit experience, including safety, for people with disabilities, both visitors and staff working at the site.

Let's take a closer look at the two calls.

The first call is for public cultural institutions and sites, such as museums, libraries, archives, archaeological areas and parks, foundations that manage publicly owned cultural assets and consortia that manage publicly owned cultural assets.

The second, on the other hand, is for private institutions.

In terms of funding, the first call provides 123,214,700 euros, with a section reserved for medium to large projects starting from a minimum of 500,000 euros. Smaller interventions of up to 500,000 euros are also funded. The second call is worth a total of 7,460,000 euros.

For both calls, the operators managing the sites can also apply.

Projects can include physical works or intangible actions within the physical and virtual space of the museum, archive, library, archaeological area or park, or monumental complex.

The goal is to enhance what these places offer through interventions that ensure broader accessibility.

Among the activities listed in the call, particularly for external accessibility, is improving the website of the institution to ensure usability and full access to information and cultural content.

Projects can also include an information point, reachable in person or remotely, that provides customer support for direct or phone bookings.

Staff can follow a dedicated training program on accessibility, customer courtesy and in-depth knowledge of the sites visitors come to see.

The funds also cover solutions for reaching and accessing the various services. This means creating signage, improving paths and parking, and providing furniture, restrooms and refreshment areas that are properly equipped and sized. In addition, for safety and emergency management, fences, gates and guided routes should be planned.

Projects can also include interventions that make the visit experience independent, such as horizontal and vertical routes that make full use of the available spaces.

To make museum itineraries more accessible, institutions can consider tools that enable broader access, such as devices or aids that help overcome specific disabilities.

Cantiere Creativo's project portfolio includes several custom solutions designed to significantly improve digital products from an accessibility standpoint. By accessibility, known in the industry as a11y, we mean removing sensory and cognitive barriers on the web, eliminating discrimination in content navigation as much as possible.

Not only do we care deeply about democratizing the web, but our work on public administration websites has also accustomed us to fairly strict accessibility requirements, since they must publish a formal accessibility statement.

That's why our latest public-facing digital projects are built from the ground up to meet Level AA conformance under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Our work focuses on:

• conditions of use (contrast and readability, zoom);
• modes of use (keyboard navigation);
• technologies (screen readers);
• preferences (prefers-reduced-motion, custom styles).

Our sites are tested with screen readers and specialized accessibility tools such as Arc Toolkit, Axe and Wave, and iterated until they are fully navigable for a very wide range of users.

But the real question is: which of the activities listed in the call can Cantiere Creativo help with, for existing clients and new ones? Quite a lot, actually, especially on the digital side of the museum experience (but not only). Of course, the work depends heavily on the existing technologies and the state of accessibility when the project starts.

For example, we're putting together a plan for the call with an institution that already uses a headless tech stack.

The activities we proposed are:

• reviewing the front-end against a11y guidelines and assessing improvements to the current setup;
• adding skip links to jump to the contact and ticketing sections;
• adding automatic audio to make page text easy to listen to;
• adding audio content with transcripts;
• adding transcripts to the existing video widgets;
• running a11y user tests and implementing any improvements;
• creating both a visual and an HTML/CSS Design System.

All these activities are covered by both calls and can make a real difference in making the site highly accessible.

If you're looking for the best accessibility solution to submit for the call, don't hesitate to contact us: together we'll find the best solution for your use case.