In September, VICTA was invited to join a Smartify focus group at the Science Museum in London to help develop a visual description service for their new gallery, Technicians: The David Sainsbury Gallery.

The gallery is an interactive showcase of STEM careers from a wide range of industries from film-set lighting technicians to rollercoaster engineers, displaying the breadth of careers available in multiple fields.

Eight families joined the Smartify team to listen to their visual description to recommend improvements and changes to make it more accessible to children and young people with a vision impairment. In addition to the visual description, the gallery also has tactile maps with braille labelling at each entrance to the gallery.

Smartify are an organisation who develop visual descriptions for artwork. Their service works by using their application on a mobile device; a QR code can be scanned next to an exhibit to hear a description of the piece.