Overview
The Ellis Island National Immigration Museum is undergoing a $100m overhaul, introducing new interactive kiosks, media theatres, and dynamic exhibits. The National Park Service needed to guarantee legal compliance under federal accessibility regulations while ensuring the museum was genuinely accessible to all visitors, regardless of physical, sensory, or cognitive differences. The programme involved dozens of independent creative and technology vendors, making consistency and governance the central challenge.
My role
As Lead Accessibility and Inclusive Design Consultant, I directed the accessibility lifecycle across the programme. My team of four partnered with client stakeholders and outside vendors, establishing governance, providing training, and auditing work from early concepts to final sign-off.
In addition to setting standards, I worked directly with vendors on interaction design, helping their teams adapt layouts, navigation patterns, and scripts to meet strict inclusive benchmarks.
Approach
The overhaul was already underway when we joined. We needed an adaptable approach that could establish shared standards across disparate working groups without stalling tight production schedules.
Setting the vision
We ran an alignment workshop with key stakeholders to define project benchmarks. Rather than treating compliance as a passive checklist, we agreed that inclusive design meant actively removing barriers to the historical narrative for visitors with sensory, physical, or neurodivergent needs.
Aligning vendors
With numerous independent agencies building exhibits, the main risk was fragmented execution. We set up structured touchpoints with creative directors, software developers, and scriptwriters to establish shared governance, spot design conflicts early, and plug skill gaps before development began.
Research plan
We advocated participatory design: involving disabled people directly in testing and design decisions. Because project deadlines ruled out open-ended foundational research, we secured stakeholder commitment to recruit participants with disabilities for hands-on evaluation during prototype and build stages.
Journey mapping
Visiting Ellis Island spans several distinct operators: ticketing agencies, the harbour ferry service, the National Park grounds, and the interior museum spaces. I mapped the entire visitor journey to pinpoint where handoffs broke down for disabled visitors, particularly when moving between outdoor transit and indoor navigation.
Guidance and training
Weekly critique and coaching
I ran weekly clinics with partner design and development teams, reviewing work in progress and providing practical corrections for layout, contrast, and focus states.
Accessible design guidance
I maintained a central repository of accessibility standards and pattern documentation, giving external agencies clear specifications for interactive components, viewing angles, and reach profiles.
Narrative inclusion
Museum accessibility often defaults to dry technical descriptions that flatten the emotional impact of exhibits. To address this, I wrote a 50-page Narrative Accessibility Guide. Developed with community advocacy groups, it established standards for alt-text, audio description, and captions that maintained the historical gravity of sensitive topics such as racial discrimination and medical exclusion.
Design considerations
Designing for a historic public landmark required solving physical, spatial, and digital challenges simultaneously:
Text size
The museum’s panoramic media displays span over 90 feet. We specified subtitle placements, typography scale, and focal zones calculated across diverse viewing angles: ensuring subtitles remained legible whether viewed by a child, an adult standing back, or a wheelchair user near the front.
Balancing historic identity with contrast
Visual identity agencies initially favoured period colour palettes with low contrast. I worked alongside their art directors to adjust tonal values and font weights, preserving the historic character of the branding while satisfying WCAG 2.2 AA contrast ratios for on-screen charts and maps.
Standardised kiosk templates
We collaborated with software vendors to produce a modular suite of touch-screen templates. Standardising touch targets, layout grids, and interactive cards across all 60 exhibits reduced development overhead and ensured predictable navigation for visitors.
Adaptive wayfinding
The initial wayfinding proposal was a static floorplan that left visitors to work out accessible routes themselves. I introduced an adaptive wayfinding model: visitors can filter itineraries by step-free access, lower-sensory zones, or available dwell time, generating a personalised route through the galleries.
Universal accessibility controls
We introduced a persistent accessibility drawer on every interactive kiosk. Visitors can independently adjust volume, invert contrast, trigger audio narration, or enlarge typography without restarting the exhibit.
Testing & validation
Hardware-based testing
Testing interactive exhibits on desktop monitors misses critical physical constraints. We held prototype testing sessions using production kiosk hardware, recruiting participants through regional disability organisations. Running these sessions on-site gave museum leaders direct insight into real-world reach, angle, and screen-reader challenges.
Compliance tracking
I created a centralised database in Airtable to track all 60 exhibits across an eight-stage compliance lifecycle. This gave museum directors and vendor leads real-time visibility into outstanding accessibility defects from initial sketches to hardware deployment.
On-site audit application
I built a progressive web app to evaluate kiosk accessibility directly on the gallery floor. Designed for mobile use, the tool lets field auditors measure physical reach ranges, button heights, glare, and digital conformance against Section 508 and WCAG standards.
