Accessibility
On-site Accessibility
The Block Museum facility is fully accessible and compliant with the American Disabilities Act. Proudly functioning as a “Place of Public Accommodation,” the museum offers elevator access, no-step entry to galleries, wheelchair-accessible restrooms, and wheelchair spaces within its auditorium. Exhibitions are laid out with emphasis on accessible routes of passage and knowledge of the 36-inch minimum clear width for wheelchair access, as well as the 40-inch ADA recommended height requirements for kiosks and displays. Block museum staff are trained in guidance and accessibility in order to create an environment that affords museum patrons full participation, equal access, and reasonable accommodation. Temporary exhibition folding stools are available to patrons upon request and borrowing access to wheelchairs is coordinated with the Northwestern University Department of Accessibility. The Museum’s location on Arts Circle Drive provides an accessible location for pick-up and drop off directly in front of the building. In 2016 a gender-neutral restroom was made available for museum patron use.
The Block Museum works with Northwestern partners at AccessibleNU to provide interpretation for its live films and programs in our auditorium and galleries upon request with 10 working days lead time prior to the event.
- Ask at our front desk for large format labels
- Access Accessible PDFs of labels for current exhibitions:
- Looking 101
- The Block Collects
- Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World
Digital Accessibility
The Block Museum of Art strives to offer experiences in the digital space that are fully accessible. We provide closed captioning for all archived museum videos dating back to 2018 and are continuing the work to caption all online videos documenting museum exhibitions, events, and programs. All videos going forward will be captioned before posting.
The Museum’s main website complies with Northwestern University’s institution-wide standard to bring websites into conformance with WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and is built to enable keyboard navigation, support the use of screen readers, and conform with alt text field requirements for all images. The Block Museum Collection database, hosted on the platform eMuseum, is also WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, however, alt text for the collection is on-going; at present screen readers will default to object title as an image description when an alt text is not available.
We are committed to providing full digital accessibility. To that end we are currently taking the following actions:
- Researching vendors for live captioning within all museum online events
- Undertaking a process to provide alt text for images in the collection database
- Ensuring alt text is included in all new catalog records for objects in the collection as well as new digital content
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us with questions or concerns about accessibility or with your specific needs.
Accessibility Contact: Lindsay Bosch, Senior Manager of Communications, Lindsay.bosch@northwestern.edu