Evaluating audio description and emotional engagement for BPS visitors in a museum context: an experimental perspective

Museums face a particular challenge in enabling blind and partially sighted (BPS) visitors to engage emotionally with the narrative(s) they present. In collaboration with a world-leading tourist attraction (Titanic Belfast) and the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), we have applied several different approaches for improving emotional engagement for BPS visitors. This paper addresses the critical challenge of how to obtain reliable evidence for evaluating the emotional response of BPS visitors to the museum’s audio description (AD) and overall experience. We consider six different methods for measuring emotional engagement, and consider their potential for providing reliable experimental evidence. Based on BPS-user feedback, we present a qualitative comparison of these methods, uniquely all applied to the same museum context.