Through the process of making our project, we ran into a few road bumps that we quickly got over. At the beginning prior to settling on the topic of turning the rooms into audio accessible ones, we struggled on finding a project to do within the James Monroe museum as we did not want to have a boring project just digitizing exhibits and artifacts. We settled on the idea of making the exhibits into audio after discussing what the museum was lacking in its exhibits, landing on the length of the text in certain sections to be a drag which would come up later, and how this would affect visitor retention when it came to actually reading the walls of text. We decided on recording audio for each of the artifacts on display and the giant text room with the goal of posting QR codes around the museum which visitors could then scan with their phones to take them to an accessible site where they could hear the text and read the transcripts while also having access to a high definition image of the artifact. In our contract we state the express goal of “working with the James Monroe Museum to make some of their exhibits more accessible by utilizing audio embeds on websites so visitors can listen to the interpretation, rather than read it all” which we followed in the final state of our project. We were able to convert the exhibits in each room into audio, working with our partner at the museum to fill in gaps of knowledge on artifacts that were missing text boxes or had very minor information in them. We used all the tools we stated in our contract including the recording software and hardware, which helped in the quality of audio staying consistent between us. We ran into issues with deadline meeting and communication between group members which caused us to have to redo and re post previous work we had already done. Another issue we ran into was the implementation of the extremely text heavy room as we debated on if we should include every single piece of text in the room, landing on keeping and recording all of it as it would help with keeping our project and website accessible for all users. Our website is able to be used on mobile and pc while also being traversable by a screen reader, we are unaware however with how a screen reader will react to the mp3 embeds. In conclusion our final website was able to align with our vision and expected outline within our contract, allowing visitors to engage with the exhibits through audio.
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