Seeing Valentino Castle through the Hands: Heritage Building Accessibility for Visitors with Visual Impairments

In order to make heritage buildings culturally significant for everyone, they have to become accessible. This should not only be physical accessibility. The information which the buildings contain must also be accessible. Where physical disability is concerned, it is equally important to be able to open the buildings to an ever wider and more diversified public, and to make it possible for everyone to “read” the information. A project with students on degree courses in architecture has made it possible to build a pathway to knowledge of the Valentino Castle for visitors with visual impairments. The castle is part of the Polytechnic University of Turin. Students made use of small scale models, tactile boards and information read aloud through Qr-codes to enable blind and visually impaired visitors to gauge space and to “read” elements of volume, structure, architecture and décor. The students’ work, with the support of the Department of Architecture and Design (DAB) laboratory, led to the creation of a “tactile guided tour” comprising scale models and tactile boards, which will be exhibited in one of the main floor rooms of the Castle in the near future, adding to the guided tours which are already in place.