The Open House Prague festival traditionally 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 ninth time, people with hearing disabilities could visit selected buildings on the weekend. In collaboration with the Institute of Deaf Studies, Charles University, the Czech Union of the Deaf, and this year also with the Hradec Králové Higher Vocational School, we offered six tours with Czech Sign Language translation,which were visited by more than 100 people, which is an increase by roughly one third compared to last year. Simultaneous transcription was also provided for visitors who cannot use sign language. These tours took place at the Hlávka Dormitory, Czech Technical University in Prague; Hlava Institute; former Central Office of the Czechoslovak Tobacco Organization (now Municipal Court Prague); Michna Palace (Tyrš House); First Czech General Reinsurance Bank (Goethe-Institut); and Grab Villa.
For the seventh time, the festival also offered special tours for visitors with visual disabilities. These tours took place in six buildings – Church of St. Anne; Quadrio; Clubhouse of the Autoclub of the Czech Republic; Palata Home; Historical Building of the National Archives; and Great Strahov Stadium. Around 35 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 provided our own model of the Historical Building of the National Archives. Volunteer tour guides of these special tours were trained by professionals from theTeiresias Center and ELSA. Double factsheets in braille were also available in the buildings. We thank our partners for the professional collaboration.
