Smartify at The Bowes Museum

This week I visited the Bowes Museum in Teeside. It is a museum I last visited as a child. I had fond memories of the grandiose architecture, and I used to love the wonderful mechanical silver swan, but I remember being frustrated by not being able to appreciate the thousands pictures and objects housed there (3038 apparently.) This time I was confident that the Smartify app would give me better access to the art, and I was not wrong.

I know from my work on the Royal Holloway Picture Gallery Audio Described Tour that Smartify is a great way of making art accessible to people who, like me, don't usually see the paintings on display, let alone the interpretations of them. Smartify is a free-to-use smart phone app (but museums and galleries pay for its services).. It scans any given space for art works it recognises and then displays information about them, together with the work itself, on the phone screen. It wasn't originally designed for blind and partially blind users, but it has completely transformed the way I experience art galleries. 

I need to have my nose almost touching a painting before I can see anything more than an indistinct blur. As a child (perhaps even at the Bowes) I quickly learnt that this kind of proximity to art is not allowed. It tends to trigger literal or metaphorical alarm bells. But how can I appreciate the art on display if I can't get close enough to see it?

This time I wanted to concentrate on the museum's nineteenth-century art room on the second floor. My latest research project is about French writers' unwitting attempts at audio description and how they might inform twenty-first century access initiatives. I knew that Emile Zola had written a short description of 'Grrandmamma's Brreakfast'  (1865) by Francois Bonvin and this was the painting I had come to visit.

The image shows a screen shot from my iphone. This is what my phone displayed when it recognised the painting. A small image of the painting is at the top of the screen, followed by information including title, artist, date, dimensions and materials. There is also a paragraph with further information and a link to the museum's digital catalogue entry for the painting. This information is identical to that displayed on the label below the painting in the gallery. Non-blind visitors are thus given two ways of accessing information. On the other hand, Smartify is the only way for me to access this painting. Not only can I enlarge the image and zoom in on all its wonderful details, I can also enlarge the label text or use my phone's inbuilt accessibility feature VoiceOver to transform the text into audio. Thanks to Smartify, I can now access works of art independently. I don't need to ask a friend or relative to read things out to me and I can go to galleries when I want without having to fit in with scheduled audio-guided tours.

There is another feature of the Smartify app which is even more beneficial to me: the option to add audio files to any painting's information page. This is what we did to create the audio-described tour at Royal Holloway. I was delighted to discover that the Bowes Museum have included audio for a handful of their paintings. When I scanned El Greco's The Tears of St Peter I found two recordings where curators and art historians discuss the paintings in more detail. These are not originally intended for blind visitors but they are what I call 'unintended audio descriptions' because they give the listener visual information about the painting as part of a broader discussion. The same is true of all the artworks featured in the Bowes Museum's Young Curator's Tour.  Adding audio files to the Smartify app effectively turns my phone into a handheld audio description device. It is a brilliant way for museums to include interesting content for all whilst simultaneously immeasurably improving access for blind visitors like me.