Museum of Access and Assistive Technology

The Museum of Access and Assistive Technology was founded by Charlotte Joanne, its Steward. It was never going to be a museum of objects. A collection of canes, Braillers and screen readers behind glass would be dead matter, the kit without the wearing. What it preserves is what each device was like to live inside: the cane as an extended nerve, the screen reader's voice as the texture of an ordinary day. It is a museum of phenomenology, prosthetic experience given a building.

Which explains the staff. Ruth, Iris, Adaeze and Tamsin are not custodians of things. Experience has to be witnessed, told, situated and walked alongside, or it is lost the moment the body that had it is gone.

The dog goes in a case anywhere. What the dog was like only survives if someone builds the room.

Its café, by the long window, is where people in the CharliVerse stop for coffee, bump into each other and hold small meetings. dice arrives there straight from somewhere else and leaves before everyone has finished; Lucy Love-Child reports on the wars.

Not objects. Impact.

The museum collects testimony, not objects. A hardware screen reader bolted into an old PC is not significant for what it was, but for what changed when it arrived and what was lost when it went: it is the boundary between two lives. The museum holds the boundary. Here, lived experience is primary evidence. Not anecdote, not colour. Evidence.

Its founding statement:

A blind woman told us the thing to remember: we can't see properly and we have lives to live. Assistive technology helps us do that. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It is a museum about accessibility disguised as a museum about technology: underneath, its subject is "the strange practical art of making an ordinary life possible when the world was not built for you".

Born described

The museum is born described: every exhibit exists first as language. There are no glass cases and no labels in small print.

The Court

It is governed by the Museum Court: Charlotte Joanne as Steward, and four staff who each see every question differently.

The collection

Iris organises it by capability, not device. Under Access, the strands are Access to Ordinary Life, Sight as a Service and Sideways Breakthroughs, with the Hall of Broken Promises for what faded. The first exhibit is On Your Own Terms.

Still under consideration as strands:

• The Blindness Productivity Gap: the cumulative energy cost of technology that works but is inefficient.
• The Attention Tax: the extra concentration it takes to get around a digital world not built for a screen reader.
• The Disability Markup: the premium charged for assistive technology sold to a captive market.
• The Agent Boss: blind people have spent decades directing intermediaries, which makes them natural early adopters of AI agents.
• Industry incentive structures: the market conditions that produced expensive, limited solutions and resisted disruption.

What it believes

Lived experience is data. The exhibit is always the impact, not the object. The museum holds both the gain and the loss. The Hall of Broken Promises is not optional. The baseline matters. Human-mediated access and direct access are different things. Inspiration is not the subject: it is documenting a war of attrition. And it would rather preserve a memory sooner, while it can still be recovered.

Behind the scenes

The museum is described in "The Einstein of the Knicker Drawer", part of Street Philosophy at Blind Ant. Its café appears in the canon of the Found Girls. Its founding document is the Museum Court Soul Document, version four. The museum is digital and unbuilt: its planned opening, the email addresses its staff may one day have, and the building the Court once imagined are plans, not things that have happened. That it has a café by a long window and a document that says it has no building is the CharliVerse being allowed to be inconsistent.