This talk will share findings from three collaborative research studies that explore the information-seeking needs and behaviours of blind and low vision users—or would-be users—of digital cultural heritage at libraries, archives, and museums, and the work of GLAM and DH professionals who try to meet these information needs. Many organizations digitize materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and rare books in order to widen access for people who cannot visit the collections in person. Rare materials are photographed, and sometimes transcribed and described in ways that are supposed to enhance their discoverability and usability, but the needs of people who are blind or have low vision might not be met if the discovery pathways to these content are hard to navigate or if the transcriptions are not marked up in ways that are amenable to assistive technology. One study, Crowdsourced Data: Accuracy, Accessibility, Authority (CDAAA), used semi-structured interviews with GLAM processionals, and a think-aloud user-centred design method with BLV participants, both analysed through qualitative coding. Enhancing Accessibility of Visual Cultural Heritage through Participatory Design’ and ‘AccessiBod’ with the Bodleian Library deployed participatory design and several novel design activities to gather data about what BLV and sighted people want to know about digital cultural heritage. The design games include 1) a tactile voting activity with braille Lego boards, and 2) a modified ‘Wizard of Oz’ activity in which we explored how BLV and sighted participants rank the relative merits of off-the-shelf AI-generated descriptions of VCH, versus human crowdsourced descriptions, curatorial metadata, and non-AI web-search results. These findings have implications for how GLAM and DH scholars and practitioners create projects, and bring new emphasis to accessibility in DH.

Victoria Van Hyning is the Assistant Professor of Library Innovation at University of Maryland, College of Information, and co-founder of the Center for Archival Futures (CAFe). She holds an MSt in Medieval English Language and Literature (Oxford) and doctorate in English literature (Sheffield). She was the inaugural DH Postdoctoral Fellow and later Humanities PI of the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse.org (University of Oxford), and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-2018) resulting in her first book, Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile (OUP, 2019). She returned to the US in 2018 to work on a new crowdsourcing project called By The People at the Library of Congress, before moving to UMD in 2020. Her current research focuses on the accessibility of cultural heritage for people with disabilities. Recent projects include Crowdsourced Data: Accuracy, Accessibility, Authority (CDAAA), a three year early career grant funded (then not funded, then funded again) by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in the USA (2022-2025), and ‘Enhancing Accessibility of Visual Cultural Heritage through Participatory Design’ a seed-grant project undertaken in partnership with colleagues at UMD, the Library of Congress, and National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. She is based in Oxford at the Bodleian Library as a Gale North America Digital Humanities Fellows, and at Jesus College as a Short-term Visiting Fellow (September to December, 2025).