Accessibility
The Museum
Introduction
The Museum is housed in a building built in 1688 on four floors, with lots of small rooms. It is Grade 1 listed. After consultation with English Heritage and the Whitby Disability Action Group, we have made it as accessible as we can within these limitations.
Wheelchair users now have access to the ground floor and to the first floor via a specially installed lift. A DVD of the upper floor and the attic is available to view while at the museum, which shows the Artists and Scientists rooms on the second floor. This is updated every year to show the year's special exhibition in the attic above. Records of exhibitions from earlier years may also be viewed.
Arrival and Car Parking Facilities
- We are in the Town Centre
- Use the Council pay and display car parks
- Avoid the Station Car Park, where clampers employed by Northern Rail operate (as at January 2008)
- There are disabled spaces in the nearest car park in Church Street, 100 yards from the museum
- It should be acceptable to use the bus bay (unofficially) at the entrance to Grape Lane from Church Street to set down a wheel chair. Our entrance is no more than 50 yards up the lane.
- Grape Lane is a narrow one way street, used mainly by traders. We don't advise its use. You could get blocked in.
- We are 10 minutes walk from Whitby's rail and bus stations
Main Entrance, Reception and Shop
- Four short ramps connect the differing levels of the street entrance, the courtyard and the ground floor rooms of the Museum
- Wheelchair users are able to negotiate them
- There are handrails where appropriate
- The reception area doubles as a shop. Staff are happy to assist if requested
- Stair access to the first floor is supplemented by a lift from reception which takes one wheelchair and carer at a time
WC
There are two WCs in the museum. One is equipped for disabled use
The Displays
There is a wealth of material and interpretation boards which can be viewed from any angle. However manuscripts and smaller artifacts are displayed flat in cases about one metre off the floor.
Large print guides are available, as are detailed room by room guides in small print. We have translations of the latter in French, Dutch and Norwegian.
DVD
The DVD for the second floor and attic is temporarily on the first floor in the Ends of the Earth Room. Longer term it will be in the old lobby on the Ground floor. Please ask the receptionist to have it turned on.
Dogs
Guide dogs may come in, other dogs should remain outside in the courtyard on a leash.
Catering
We do not provide refreshments, being in the middle of town where there is varied and ample provision.
Access Statement
We will use our best endeavours to enable access and make improvements to the Museum, both in terms of physical barriers and participation in all its services and activities, within the constraints of a Grade I listed building on four floors, and the financial resources available to a small independent Museum.
To this end we will continue to make incremental improvements and adaptations, conduct regular audits, monitor and review our policy, consulting with Whitby Disability Action Group and other groups as appropriate.
(September 2005, reviewed January 2007)
Website features and standards used
Introduction
We are keen to have our site available to as many users as possible. If you use our site with a particular piece of software or technology and are experiencing problems please contact us and we'll see if we can help rectify any problems.
Site Standards
Our site has been built using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.0.
It complies with the W3C guidelines for these standards and closely follows the recommendations of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Where dynamic content is delivered, via the use of JavaScript, we have provided an alternative non JavaScript page.
Access keys
The following access keys are in use on this site:
- 0 Accessibility
- 1 Homepage
- 2 Visitor Information
- 3 Special Exhibition
- 4 The Museum
- 5 James Cook
- 6 Whitby Past and Present
- 7 What Visitors say about us
- 8 Contact us
To highlight a link:
Windows users would normally hold down the Alt key and press the required accesskey.
MAC users hold down the ctrl key and press the required access key.
Press enter to activate the link.
Resizable text
The text used on the site can be re-sized using the text sizing tool found in most browsers.
This tool can be found in the following menus:
- Internet Explorer 5 and above for PC: view > text size
- Internet Explorer 5 for MAC: view > text zoom
- Mozilla, Netscape 6 and above: view > text zoom
- Safari for MAC: View > Make Text Bigger
- Opera 7: view > zoom
- Firefox: View > Increase Text Size
- More modern browsers also let you increase and decrease font-size by holding down the ctrl and pressing +, or - respectively. To return to the normal size use ctrl and 0.