Making art accessible for the blind

Siddhant Shah is a Mumbai-based heritage architect and accessibility consultant who is working towards making art accessible for the blind. He is also a winner of the NCPDEP-mphasis award 2017.

27-year-old Shah set up the organization Access for ALL in Mumbai in 2016 to open up the physical and social limits in cultural spaces to make it inclusive for everyone.

Shah is India’s first architect to make heritage projects and museums accessible to the blind. Shah says that during a trip to Greece he saw how accessible the museums were with disabled-friendly galleries, making it possible for the blind to enjoy them. This opened his eyes up to the possibility of doing the same in India.

Shah and his friends won a competition hosted by UNESCO and Archaeological Survey of India to make world heritage sites accessible to the disabled. He has created tactile surfaces and textures for the blind and published India and Pakistan’s first museum braille publication with large fonts and tactile imagery.

Watch in Sign Language

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lt25bcZirEI%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26rel%3D0