Co-designing Inclusive Museums with People with Intellectual Disabilities: A Pilot Study in Immersive Virtual Environments

Immersive virtual environments represent a great opportunity for museums to enhance the visitor experience through edutainment. To provide an enjoyable experience for all people, including those with disabilities, virtual museums should respond to criteria for accessibility and inclusion, providing greater cultural equity and learning opportunities for all social groups. To achieve this goal, there is a need to integrate a user-centered approach where people with disabilities are involved in co-designing the virtual museum experience. After a description of the theoretical framework used to define self-determination, the paper describes the importance of structuring a research context that fosters the self-determination of people with intellectual disabilities and expands the procedures to support the creation of accessible museum captions, thanks to the application of easy-to-read guidelines. A pilot study conducted at the University of Macerata has been carried out to test the proposed method. In particular, high-fidelity prototyping was explored within a virtual laboratory to support co-design activities with people with intellectual disabilities who collaborated to ensure the accessibility of immersive solutions for museums. The results suggest the importance and implications of a co-design approach in defining design requirements to ensure the accessibility of immersive virtual reality applications for cultural heritage.