106.5 JACK fm Bristol

A new project at Bristol Museum is enabling people who are blind to find out about many historic artifacts for the first time.

Objects throughout the museum have been given 'audio labels' which are stored on a 'talking pen'.

The gadget was originally made to label everyday objects like food or CDs but it now means visually impaired visitors can have access to all the information in the galleries.  It is the first time that the Museum has provided audio interpretation and the first time that PenFriend has been used to improve access for visually impaired people in a museum or heritage setting.

A group of eleven visually impaired people helped trial PenFriend in the Egypt gallery.

One of them, Jennifer Stirratt, who is registered blind, told us she's already learnt a lot: "For visually impaired people, they just walk round museums and it's just one glass case after another. This really brought it to life. We knew what we were looking at, we knew the history of the items and how old they were and what they were used for. All things that we had no idea of before."

Museum Learning Officer Paul Sullivan said this has been a really useful piece of technology and they're getting excellent feedback. He said: "We've found the experiment that we did so helpful that we are actually going to install this in our new museum M Shed , the city history museum for Bristol which will open next year. So we should be the first in the country to use it in that way."

Each PenFriend can store up to 70 hours of sound recordings.  These could include spoken descriptions of historic objects, readings of information panels and object labels, comments from artists, curators and visitors.

• Tweet

More from Bristol's News

• More Council Tax To Go To Fire Service
• Ex-Scout Leader Jailed For 15 Years
• Dewani Scheduled To Be In The Dock