Into the “Museum of Austerity”

Accessibility, iteration and lessons learned from Director Sacha Wares and team of the IDFA-award winning Museum of Austerity

Directed by Sacha Wares and based on the reporting of collaborator John Pring of Disability News Service, Museum of Austerity (2021) uses volumetric capture in a mixed reality project for the HoloLens headset to tell stories of disabled people in the UK who died as a result of welfare support cuts in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis. Co-produced by English Touring Theatre, National Theatre UK and Trial and Error, with creative technology by All Seeing Eye and Dimension Studio, the project previewed at London Film Festival Expanded in 2021, and subsequently won the IDFA DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction Award 2021. A touring version is currently being developed for theatrical presentation in the UK in 2023.

The Accessibility and Disability Innovation working group at MIT Open Documentary Lab & Co-Creation Studio invited Museum of Austerity’s Director Sacha Wares to discuss their team’s approach to accessibility and care in the production and exhibition of the work. The following is based on her March 2022 presentation.

The sound design in Museum of Austerity responds to the embodied presence of a viewer in physical and mixed reality space. Approaching each holographic representation of a person who died as a result of the Austerity era cuts activates the sound of a relative talking about that person’s last moments. In closer proximity to the person’s hologram, one can hear that actor’s breathing. Turning away to leave triggers comments from politicians in the House of Commons about the law itself, changes to the benefit system or the person’s death. This juxtaposition collapses the distance between political decision making, the individuals impacted and the audience.

Due to the nature of the subject matter, a significant consideration in the production of the work was the mental wellbeing of both the production team, the participating families, and the audience. Says Wares:

We had a psychotherapist and a theater wellbeing practitioner on hand for the whole (production) process… There was mental health support for participating families and anybody within the creative team who wanted it and an agreement that at any point that if anybody working on the project wanted to step away from the material, they could, and people did take that up and they were… vocally grateful for that having been said from the start.

That part of the creative process, I felt we managed really sensitively and that was a lot to do with our main collaborator John Pring’s take on it as a journalist. He came to the project with strong feelings about how you talk about suicide in journalism, which is quite different from how you maybe would in theater… There are strict rules in journalism about what you should and shouldn’t say about someone taking their own life to avoid triggering those with personal experience of mental distress. John was scrupulous about that, and that really limited a lot of what we could show, what we could say, and that was to the project’s benefit because often when you’re limited you have to think in alternative ways and I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s quite restrained as a piece of work, and I think that contributes to its power.

The project’s creative team includes disabled and non-disabled artists and offers comprehensive, inclusive and clearly signposted access information for audiences.

The access offer includes through-experience audio description, in-headset captioning, a BSL (British Sign Language) onboarding video, wheelchair access and a range of accessible amplification options for audiences.

Leaning into the access considerations of the subject matter resulted in innovation in the exhibition of the work, including a bespoke content editing tool whereby audiences can select not to see certain material:

At the testing phase, it was clear that there was potential for some audience members to be overwhelmed by the subject matter particularly if there was an overlap with their own experience. We took the audience care responsibility in terms of content warnings very seriously and also offered the option of content removal. We realized that because each story is independent and they’re holograms, you can take content out, and it doesn’t affect somebody’s experience, because the stories are thematically connected, but not narratively so — you don’t need to have seen one to understand the next one. For the audience there is a list of content warnings and if there’s anything on the content warning that they don’t want to see, we can remove those stories.

Sacha and the majority of the creative team have a background in theater, where there are industry standards for accessibility that are not currently present in the production or exhibition of XR/immersive work. Wares highlights that due to a lack of established accessibility approaches in immersive space, the creative team incorporated some existing conventions from theater and film, aiming to balance the interplay between audience expectations, aesthetic considerations and technical constraints.

Consideration of accessibility during production, recruiting an access testing panel and drawing on the lived experience within the creative team contributed significant, innovative approaches.

A team member’s own light sensitivity led to the addition of brightness adjustment as an audience access offer. Similarly, the iterative process involved in addressing another team member’s access to work in progress, led to a successful sighted guide solution being on offer to audiences by opening night.

The importance of testing with people where embodied audience movement is part of the design of the work was another learning, relating to differences in the ways devices respond to eye movement and physical mobility; for example awareness of the responses of sound zone triggers to wheelchair movements, including reversing rather than head turning. Importantly, information about accessible versions could be used to train hosts at exhibiting venues.

Innovation through inclusive design contributed in other unexpected ways. Rest points were offered in the design of the work for people with mobility difficulties, with folding chairs for people to use. Wares notes that, “Lots of people [without] mobility challenges took advantage of those chairs, so again, it was another example of where the whole experience benefited.”

Accessibility needs clear signposting in advance of the point of booking so audiences understand not only how work is available accessibly, but also what to anticipate at venues. Sacha explains.

We made our own BSL and captioned marketing video that told people a little bit about what to expect, organized a survey of the venue and, with the audio description company VocalEyes, produced an audio guide about what audiences would encounter in the venue…

The creative side of the access planning was really pleasurable and … where we’ve encountered difficulties it resulted in positive gains for the work … I think if we don’t take care to make our work accessible in the widest way, then we are guilty of excluding audiences and artists from the journey and underusing the combined power of art and technology to shape inclusive spaces of the future.

Further information from Museum of Austerity sound designer Gareth Fry about making immersive experience accessible can be found here.

This piece is part of Immerse’s 2023 issue centering disability innovation in documentary and emerging tech — presenting perspectives from artists, activists, scholars and technologists at the vanguard of storytelling and disability justice. You can find other featured stories and more information about the issue here.

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