Far from Sight, Close to Imagination: Audio guides on Museum Accessibility in Portugal

Communication in tourism must be established from a full-blown perspective, which relates advertisement to the promotion of tourism offers, in line with what Chazaud (1997) and Deshayes (2002) uphold. According to the first author, it is of the utmost importance to develop an interface between cultural services and visitors, which is considerably significant in the case of heritage tourism and museums. This interface enables visitors to enjoy their visit, which includes, on the one hand, the technical representation of a space or collection, by means of human guides, audio guides and interactive kiosks, and, on the other, the participation of a number of external services [e.g. tourism information centres, transport, hotels and restaurants], so as to create an overall product that presents itself as appealing to these visitors. Therefore, the focus of this paper will be on the exploration of traditional audio guides [and subsequent updates] as a technological resource at the service of heritage tourism, as well as of their potential in terms of enabling cultural mediation among space-collection-visitor and fulfilling their pedagogical function and that of vulgarisation of technical language [Deshayes, 2002]. This approach results from the research project conducted in our doctorate, which dealt with listing the audio guides on offer in Portuguese museums, and other similar institutions, and with the analysis of a sample of their texts based on institutional, technical, macrostructural and microstructural criteria. Bearing in mind the results obtained from our analysis, it became possible to corroborate the above-mentioned functions of audio guides and their fundamental role in visitors' accessibility, particularly those who are blind or visually-impaired.