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MAIEC Guide to Inclusive Museums

Inclusion 2025: A Practitioner’s Guide to Inclusive Museums

This guide is one of many components of the Museum Accessibility, Inclusion and Engagement Collaborative (MAIEC) project that was launched in December of 2015 by the Ontario Museum Association (OMA), the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI). The MAIEC project is our response to the challenge we posed to the broader museum community in the 2016 Conference, and a recognition of the needs we face as a sector to do better, and continue doing better, in truly being inclusive to the communities we serve.

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An Interview with Roberto Tejada, CAA’s New Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion

CAA News Today: An Interview with Roberto Tejada, CAA’s New Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion

Roberto Tejada, CAA’s newly elected vice president for diversity and inclusion and Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English and Art History at University of Houston, spoke with Hunter O’Hanian, CAA’s executive director, about the state of the field and why achieving true diversity is so difficult in the arts field.

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Museum Access Consortium: Advancing Accessibility at New York’s Cultural Institutions for People with All Abilities

Museum Access Consortium

Following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the Museum Access Consortium (MAC) was formed by a small group of museum and disability professionals that started meeting informally to discuss topics related to accessibility at their New York-based institutions. Today, MAC is an association that regularly hosts professional development workshops and offers a network of mutual support to help practitioners engage with disability advocates and people who have disabilities to learn about, implement, and strengthen best practices for access and inclusion in cultural facilities of all types throughout the New York metro area and beyond.

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Smithsonian Accessibility Program: Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design

Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design

This document contains guidelines (listed together in the Overview section) as well as design tools (listed in conjunction with the guidelines in Section B). The guidelines are in part based on construction standards established for the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. They represent Smithsonian methods for arriving at the laws’ required end: accessible exhibitions that work for people with disabilities as well as for the rest of the public. Together the guidelines become the Smithsonian standard for accessible exhibition design.

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Case Studies in Museum Diversity

Case Studies in Museum Diversity

In 2015, Ithaka S+R, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) set out to quantify with demographic data an issue that has been of increasing concern within and beyond the arts community: the lack of representative diversity in professional museum roles. Ithaka’s analysis found there were structural barriers to entry in these positions for people of color.