The Open House Prague festival typically also focuses on groups of citizens who are limited in exploring architecture by their handicaps. Our festival program includes details on wheelchair-accessible areas in the open buildings, and in collaboration with our partners, we organize special guided tours in selected buildings for people with visual disabilities and hearing disabilities.
For the eighth time, people with hearing disabilities could visit selected buildings on the weekend. In collaboration with the Institute of Deaf Studies, Charles University and the Czech Union of the Deaf, we offered six tours with Czech Sign Language translation, which were visited by more than 60 people. Simultaneous transcription was also provided for visitors who cannot use sign language. These tours took place at the Pavilion of Tropical AgriSciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague; Hartig Garden and Plečnik Pavilion at Prague Castle; Prague-Bubny railway station – future office of the Center of Memory and Dialogue Bubny; Archbishop Grammar School; Garden of Arts; and the historical boathouse of the Czech Yacht Club.
For the sixth time, the festival also offered special tours for visitors with visual disabilities. These tours took place in six buildings – Great Strahov Stadium, Troja Chateau, Palata Home, Štvanice Power Station, Quadrio, and the clubhouse of the Autoclub of the Czech Republic. Around 50 visitors with visual disabilities attended these tours. The tours also included tactile plans and urban maps of the buildings and their surroundings, provided – as usual – by the Teiresias Centre at Masaryk University (Support Center for Students with Special Needs) and ELSA at the Czech Technical University (Support Center for Students with Special Needs), including necessary professional consulting. SONS ČR (Czech Blind United) provided route descriptions and means of transportation between buildings.
We also used 3D models of buildings that were designed and printed in the past by students of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, Technical University of Liberec, and we also provided a new model of the Great Strahov Stadium. Volunteer tour guides of these special tours were trained by professionals from the Teiresias Center and ELSA. Double factsheets in braille were also available in the buildings. We thank our partners for the professional collaboration.
