Accessibility in Museums: The Buonconsiglio App Proves It Can Be Done (Already, Today)
Introduction
On March 27, 2026, in the heart of Trento, the official presentation of the Buonconsiglio App took place: a free application designed to make visiting the Castello del Buonconsiglio accessible to diverse audiences, with four dedicated itineraries and a long history of co-design behind it.
The event brought together the museum's education services team, researchers from CIMEC at the University of Trento, representatives from ENS (the National Deaf Association), the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired, and the founders of amuseapp. A packed room that already told the story of this project on its own: not just another app, but the result of years of genuinely listening to the public.
The problem nobody wants to see
In Italy, more than 3.1 million people live with a disability. On top of that, around 600,000 people are on the autism spectrum and over 270,000 students have specific learning disorders (SLD). Yet only 9.3% of this population attend cinemas, theatres or museums, compared with 30.8% of the rest of the population.
Architectural barriers have seen some improvement in recent years: more than 50% of Italian museums have ramps, lifts and accessible facilities. But that share drops below 20% when it comes to projects dedicated to sensory or cognitive disabilities.
The hardest problem to solve, in short, is not physical. It's communicative.
A person with a hearing disability watching a video without subtitles just sees images passing by in silence. A person with a cognitive disability facing an overly technical panel finds text that doesn't speak their language. A person with a visual disability in a room without audio description finds themselves in a space where much of the content is, quite simply, invisible.
A project with deep roots
The Castello del Buonconsiglio is no stranger to accessibility. As the education team recalled during the event, the first project dates back to 2006, a then-pioneering initiative called "Contatto al Museo" ("Contact at the Museum"), and since then the museum has built a method: listen before designing.
"This process has helped us grow a great deal professionally as museum staff," they emphasized during the presentation. The guiding principle was "nothing about us without us": not just designing for people with disabilities, but with them.
In this sense, the Buonconsiglio App did not start from a technical brief. It grew out of focus groups with people with visual, hearing and cognitive disabilities, repeated testing, and feedback that changed concrete design choices.
The most telling example? The app's dark background. The initial idea called for a light interface, consistent with the institutional website. But during testing with visually impaired users it became clear that a light background creates significant visual problems. Result: the app has a dark background. Not as an aesthetic choice, but because the people who use it asked for it.
Four itineraries, one vision
The Buonconsiglio App is built around four distinct routes, designed to meet real visiting needs:
1. Standard itinerary Designed for the general public (tourists, citizens, residents), it offers orientation within the space and essential content for understanding the history of the castle and its collections. A complex place that often left visitors disoriented.
2. Family itinerary Designed not to simplify the content, but to make it more engaging. This is where augmented reality comes in: sculptures and paintings come to life and tell their own stories. A way to introduce children to history without trivializing it.
3. Italian Sign Language (LIS) itinerary One of the most innovative aspects of the project. The LIS videos were made with two interpreters, chosen partly with attention to regional variation in sign language, a detail that many overlook but that the team learned to value along the way. One of the two interpreters, Valentina Vani, works with Carlo Di Biase, a deaf art history teacher, who is working on developing new LIS terms for abstract art history concepts. The work done for this app contributes, in a small way, to a broader linguistic project.
4. Itinerary for people with visual disabilities Detailed audio descriptions of the artworks and spaces, accompanied by a system for independent orientation via Bluetooth Low Energy sensors placed throughout the rooms. The system guides visitors with voice directions on direction and distance, signals changes in route and lets them request staff assistance. Independence, as the UICI representative noted during the event, is a fundamental dimension of experience quality.
Technology as a means, not an end
During the presentation, Marco Da Rin Zanco, co-founder and CEO of amuseapp, read out a press release from the Ministry of Culture from a few days earlier. It spoke of a future vision: transforming museums from informational tools into capable platforms, with AI, personalization, and sensory and cognitive accessibility.
"It made me smile," Marco said, "because this group of professionals started thinking about all this a couple of years ago. What is being presented today at a national level as innovative is already reality here."
The comment wasn't meant as boasting, but as an observation about the sector's systemic delay, and about how much it matters to start early.
On the technological side, building it wasn't without challenges. The sensors for indoor navigation require complex calibrations that vary depending on ceiling materials. The generative artificial intelligence models used for some content cannot generate scenes containing nudity, a significant limitation in a castle that houses Renaissance artworks. Every obstacle required specific solutions, developed in close dialogue with the museum's team.
The final result, which reached version 13 or 14 of the app in recent months, is a product that Marco described not as "just another app", but as "a different universe". Not as hyperbole, but because there is a method behind it: gather real needs, test them with people, iterate until the product truly works.
The research contribution: CIMEC, University of Trento
One of the distinctive elements of this project was the presence of academic research. CIMEC (the Interdepartmental Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento) took part from the earliest stages, contributing the expertise of Professor Francesco Pavani on cognitive maps of spaces and cognitive processes in elderly people and people with degenerative disabilities.
"Knowledge is a vehicle for democracy," said the director of CIMEC during the event. "Putting what we study at the service of the community is a duty."
The dialogue between research and museum practice made it possible to build solid foundations for design choices that would otherwise have remained purely intuitive. It is not a new model, CIMEC had already collaborated on an accessibility project for people with autism together with the Museo di San Michele, but it is still far too rare on the Italian cultural scene.
What genuine universal accessibility really means
In the sector there is still a belief that accessibility is a sum of interventions dedicated to individual disabilities: a ramp, a braille guide, a video in sign language. It's an approach that, rather than including, keeps on isolating.
Universal accessibility starts from a different idea: designing experiences that anyone can use, so that solutions created for the most specific needs improve the experience for everyone. The dark background that helps people with low vision also works better in brightly lit environments. Audio descriptions designed for people who cannot see enrich the understanding of those who want to explore further. Simplified content for people with cognitive disabilities makes visits easier for children and foreign tourists too.
This isn't a watered-down compromise. It's a more ambitious project.
A replicable model
The Buonconsiglio App is free and includes an end-of-visit questionnaire that activates after visitors have covered at least 50% of the route. The data collected (how many visitors choose the LIS itinerary, how many people use the audio description, which times record peak attendance) will be essential for understanding what works and what needs improving.
Because this is not a finish line. As the museum team put it at the close of the event: "This is a milestone. The journey continues."
amuseapp is now present in more than 100 Italian cultural institutions. The Castello del Buonconsiglio case is one of the most comprehensive when it comes to accessibility, not because of its technological complexity, but because of the method behind how it was built.
A method that can be replicated. That should be replicated.
