Ableism-Decentralized Research On Museums Accessibility

The current accessibility of museums in China is not perfect,but it is not a lack of capacity,but a lack of awareness of the problem.People with disabilities have long been the object in museums,they are unable to express the subjectivity in activities,and the relevance of exhibitions is not high enough.This is related to the ableism-centered perspective of non-disabled people,and raising awareness of the theoretical knowledge of disability studies can make museums and their practitioners aware of the limitations of their own perspectives and willing to change them,so as to ableism-decentralize all aspects of museums.This will lead to a willingness to change and to de-center all aspects of museums and to improve museum accessibility from its roots.As the economy grows,the quality of the population improves,and people’s desire for cultural resources increases,more visitors flock to museums.To ensure that they can open for all of the people,museums need to make some changes.The diversity of the audience’s perceptions puts new demands on the way they are presented,and the need to be respected makes it necessary for museums to stop acting as superior knowledge-givers and transform themselves into knowledge-disseminators,even giving up part of their discourse in some special contexts,allowing the audience to fully participate in the museum’s narrative space.Therefore,this paper first introduces the concept of ableism,removes the disabled from the opposite side of the concept of "able-bodied",and seeks to analyze the ability and willingness of museums to change the status quo by collecting examples of museum activities,multisensory museum practices,and other museum concepts for the people with disability in China and abroad.In addition,we conclude that the most important task of museum accessibility in China is to promote the development of the concept outside of the existing perspective,and list specific implementation responses.