Here´s a new section in the blog. This section, Vizeme reports, will talk about several cultural and art spaces across Vidzeme region (and probably all Latvia) and the experience taken from them, how are they for accesibility, specially for foreign people such my case. It´s not a critic section but a way to talk and give ideas to improve the cultural spaces of the country and give a good face from it, face that it´s completely unknown from people outside the region and of course outside the country.
I´ll begin
this report about the first thing that concerns and it´s its accessibility to
non-speaking latvian people. Warn that this is a point of view, a personal
testimony about the place in question and my ends are trying to give an
improvement of the facility fr everyone and spread the place to everyone as
well not to criticize the place, never.
Starting with
the language accessibility, several things prevailed against others: outside,
the road signs and ther announcements have an english written aside of the
latvian one as we can see in the following images:
As we know
and look around the city, these road signs are all across the town, they are
not exclusive from the museum and probably not planned from the museum as well.
Althought,
once inside the “museum territory” (let´s call like this the part which is the
museum and the surrounding area that ends until the ancient walls of the town)
we can see some indications which are translated into english too:
An
interesting project I never could imagine happen of collaboration in between
russian an european-arm part.
Things change
when arriving at the museum´s main building, where the temporal exhibitions are
located. Should note the most important one: for the exhibitions and explaining
each work and each hall, all of it, was purely on latvian; no english versión of it (nor russian as well, althought this is
something more surprising rather tan inconvenient). This is said, but it was
hard to actually understand most of the three exhibitions´ background due the
legend and description was in just one language. It´s a pity, because all the
texts were long with surely a lot of details that one couldn´t just notice just
watching:
Here we can
appreciate several texts of two of the current exhibitions: one about public
transport in Valmiera and another about toys and children´s table games where
it´s explained at detail the story and background of the exhibitions, but it´s
everything in latvian. For the other exhibition there are no detail potos due
it is an art exhibition where only the name of the artista and year of the work
is marked, with no intro-story or biography included.
Gift shop
also completely in latvian. The important information (such timetable),
however, is kept in a way which can be understandable by most of people
regardless their idiom: by iconographic signs.
Only latvian
idiom on the exhibitions was probably the main setback of the infrastructure
and organization. But things doesn´t end just here. I asked to the kind
receptionist several questions about the museum and what I could get of
important information from her was mainly this:
-They dispose
of guides, so it´s important for a museum. Unknown, however, if the guide would
speak more fluently english.
-When I
entered in the museum she couldn´t gave me change of the money I gave for the
ticket fee, at the end she kindly allowed me to enter for free. The lack of
change could give in my mind two things: or they have just changed the incoming
of benefits or not too many visits are received.
-Should be
another note is related with the main “english idiom” problem but the receptionist
wasn´t able to speak fluently english and I had to speak in a broken manner
with her to arrive on conclusions. This is the reason why I was a bit doubtful
about the guide´s skills as well.
Still
maintaining with the english fluff. The webpage
of the museum is quite complete and exact, serving and answering in most of the
questions that one would make when planing to visit a museum. It´s avaliable in
a total of five idioms (latvian, estonian, english, German and russian) but at
the time one clicks on his/her prefered idiom the interface changes slightly,
giving clearly that all the information is written in latvian is somewhat
shorter and less dense in english (for example); even worse, interacting with
the page in the english version has some mistakes to fix due it is needed to
click in a exact path if you want to keep reading in english (or other of the 3
other avaliable idioms) and not being sent to the latvian version. Other
sections of the page are just no translated such the “news” section.
Photoshot of
Valmiera´s Museum webpage.
Photoshot of
the “news” section.
Another note
I want top ut it´s that the museum space itself consists in a inclined terrain
where people must be cautelous to don´t fall on the hill…but the problem it´s specially for disabled people.
I want to note this because in the building itself the elevator for all the
floors was serving as the mop bucket´s storage. Very probably the staff of the
museum seeing someone disabled would quickly go and withdraw the stuff but I
got to mention the access to the other buildings actually: for example, going
to the gift´s shop would be hard for a dissabled person due the very inclined
stairs on it and I said already about the problema for going to the low part of
the hill.
Here are you
can see the mop with the elevator locked.
Upper level
of the elevator.
So we have
put the main setbacks in the museum. But now let´s head to the resolution
ideas:
About the
idiom. Let´s start for the simplest one solution which we can put in the webpage:
take care and translate COMPLETELY the webpage itself, so there´s no wrong
links nor mistaken redirections (so if you are reading the english version it
doesn´t drive you to the latvian one once you click a hyperlink…unless it´s
mandatory). “News” section can be however a bit stressing due it requires often
reupdating and then often translating but for example could be enough with just
translating the title and putting a small explaining text of one or two lines
lenght.
For the
physical and infrastructure part things get more challenging but still is
possible. Nowadays most temporal exhibitions has an english part. It´s stern to
have to do it with so much text as I saw in the exhibitions…however this could
be solved just reducing the text format and allowing the english text get
inside or putting in another explaining banner the english version of the
latvian text. In the upper level exhibition could have been enough for example
to translate the latvian intro banner where most of the vital information about
the exhibition is (example: just giving in english the biography about the
artista kārlis Batgalis and his wave in art), so it could save time and effort.
But however for the lower level exhibition (the one which was about table games
and children games) and similars the whole texts must be explained due that it
was noticed that all the explanation banners were descriptions of EACH of the
games…meaning that a foreign person misses most of the reason to understand the
purpose of the visit.
It´s only
asked for an english translation. Probably most of the foreign visitants are
russians or from one of the other baltic countries but english is the most appealed
language for international topics so it could put all the nationalities
altogether in once.
And finally,
for the access to some parts. I noticed that in some parts of Latvia the
infrastructure has a well-made adaption for disabled persons. In Riga, for
example, many public stairs have a two-sided slide for wheels made of steel in
a side of the stairs. With the stairs for the gift shop could be done the same.
And about the access to the forest from the upper level of the hill (where the
main building museum is) that part could be fixed just changing some broken and
uneven stones and a railing for helping some people to go down easily and
without problems due the inclination it´s a bit pronounced (I should remind
it).
On the other hand I don´t want to leave good
points without noticing. The receptionist who atended me, despite the
difficulties to talk with her in english she showed herself as someone polite
and helpful in all posible. And also, the location of the museum is in the best
part of the city, right when the deep Gauja forest begins and creates a small
valley, so this location could be taken more in advantage.
