Local Startup Capption Enhances Visitor Experience at WAM and American Swedish Institute

Article by Becky Fillinger, photos provided

Weisman Art Museum (WAM) recently launched a new service to enhance visitors’ access to the artwork and information in the gallery, in ways that best suit their needs — whether they’re low/no vision, socially anxious, a non-native English-speaker, or simply prefer to reread and revisit information on their own. 

Susannah SchouweilerThe Twin Cities-based start-up Capption developed this marvelous web-based platform that transforms the museum going experience. We talked to Susannah Schouweiler, Director of Marketing and Communications at WAM and Capption co-founder Sherman Bausch to learn more about its deployment at WAM, how the innovative technology works and how we might make use of it during our next museum visit. 

Q:  What was the motivation to offer Capption services at WAM?

Schouweiler:  We're the campus art museum for the University of Minnesota, and we know our student, faculty, and staff populations speak many languages and come to the museum with a wide variety of abilities, needs and preferences. We're also a public museum for the Twin Cities, and community members who come through our doors for a visit are equally varied. This is about doing the work to make all in our community welcome at the Weisman. At a public institution like ours, accessibility is simply essential. It’s central to our mission to ensure everyone is able to engage with the art, information, and ideas that make a trip to the museum meaningful and fun. We’ve explored more piecemeal digital platforms in the past to offer accessible ways in to the art and information at WAM, but Capption is a real leap forward in this work. Thanks to this platform, we can put all of these offerings together in one place, and present them to visitors in a way that’s easy and intuitive to use. 

Q:  What if a WAM visitor doesn’t have a smartphone?

Schouweiler: We have smartphones at the front desk that visitors can borrow if their own device isn’t compatible with Capption. WAM’s loaner phones are loaded with the platform, ready to use, and freely available, if needed.

Q:  What has been the feedback so far?  How will visitor feedback be collected to improve the service over time?

Schouweiler: We’re definitely getting enthusiastic feedback from visitors, and early analytics show the multilingual translation is particularly welcome. We’re continuously gathering feedback from visitors through surveys and observational evaluation to improve and enhance our use of the platform in the galleries. The team at Capption has been amazing to work with - they’re as eager as we are to use what we learn from visitor feedback to refine and augment the technology as we learn more about what our audiences need, and how they’re using the service.

Let’s also hear from the Capption developer, Sherman Bausch:

Sherman BauschQ:  Why did you develop this marvelous product?

Bausch: Everyone at Capption loves galleries, museums, and other exhibitions. None of us are identifiably disabled, but all of us feel underserved by typical exhibit displays. Turns out we’re not alone - over 350 million people worldwide possess non-obvious sight, mobility, anxiety, and language impairments.

Art, science, and nature exhibits must make sense to be engaging. When there’s a visual, social, or linguistic barrier blocking access to an exhibit’s context, engagement drops and frustration builds. Capption eliminates those barriers.

Q:  Who is Capption designed for?

Bausch; Capption helps museums, galleries, and nature centers serve low-vision, aging, and non-native speaking visitors. With Capption, exhibitors deliver critical exhibit content and context directly to a visitor’s smartphone:

• Immediately
• In context
• In a hyperlegible font
• In any language
• Respecting individual settings
• Readable (or listenable) at any pace
• Recording a referenceable history

At least 1 in 6 visitors have a disability that makes exhibitions daunting. Capption helps previously-excluded visitors feel welcome by granting them autonomy, agency, and access they need to engage with dignity.

Additionally, we engineered Capption to amplify an exhibit’s impact. Capption is a quick, simple enhancement to a curator’s designed experience, not a distraction that competes with their exhibit for visitors’ attention.

We want exhibitors to provide accessibility services discreetly and with dignity. Capption helps people who need it and can be ignored by those who don’t.

Q:  How does the service accommodate languages with different scripts or structures, like Mandarin or Arabic?

Bausch: Fortunately, your phone does already support different scripts and language structures, but it’s up to developers to leverage them properly. Our apps and backend services enforce formatting with a level of fidelity and speed websites can’t match. Capption supports both machine and human translations in 120+ languages.

Q:  What challenges have you faced during the development of Capption and how have they been addressed?

Bausch: A ton of work goes into engineering such a simple experience. Our team had to overcome multiple unknowns to build Capption:

• Learn how institutions discuss and implement accessibility today
• Understand visitors’ unassisted exhibit experience
• Determine precisely where, when, how, and why Capption helps each audience
• Architect the fastest, lightest experience possible with modern tools (most of which are built for bloat)
• Figure out the best way for institutions to implement and promote Capption
• Engage with possible clients to support funding requests

Throughout development, discipline has been Capption’s watchword. That’s meant empathetic research, painstaking architecture, methodical engineering, unflinching testing, and a tempered pace that gives space to think and try things. Everyone on the Capption team is a 20+ year software veteran, and we unanimously agree that this is the most “correct” we’ve ever done development.

Q:  Where will we see Capption installed here in the Twin Cities? How may we follow your news?

Bausch: Right now, you can see Capption live at the Weisman Art Museum and American Swedish Institute. We’re in conversations with a multitude of other exhibitors throughout the region, and we hope to see Capption expand access everywhere!

You can sign up for updates at https://capption.com/news or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. For direct inquires, we’d love to hear from you at hello@capption.com.