The representation of people with visual impairments on five art museums' websites. Images and text analysis
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2020-08-21
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en
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Abstract
This thesis examines the representation of people with visual impairments on the website of five Spanish and Dutch art museums — Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid), and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Barcelona), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)—. By analysing the promotional pictures, videos, and texts of different accessible activities made for this specific kind of visitors in these institutions, we have been able to determine how visually impaired people are portrayed nowadays. What this thesis involves, then, is the re-examination of presumably inclusive activities that are being promoted digitally using representations of visually impaired people.
The Visual Social Semiotics and the Multimodal Cultural analyses have been helpful to make comparisons. Several patterns have been found based on three hypotheses: firstly, how Dutch and Spanish museums represent people with visual impairments; secondly, how modern and contemporary art museums portray them; and whether the representation of this heterogeneous group of tourists changes when it is written or visually captured via videos and pictures.
The scarcity of visually impaired people represented on the media has influenced the way non-visually impaired population has perceived them. Stereotypes are still present nowadays because some discourses, featuring this specific group of society, are produced by non-impaired people. Ableist representations are the consequence, and the produced images by the latter are rather imagined and influenced by these stereotypes than experienced.
Key words: the blind gaze, ableism, accessible tourism, impairment, disability, social model, disability media studies.
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