Tom O'Neill's story - Access to Historic Buildings
Channel: National Disability Authority
Date: 2012-06-01

This video was produced for the Access to Heritage Conference that took place on 30th May 2012 at the Law Society, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7. This conference was jointly hosted by the National Disability Authority and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The conference presentations can be found on the NDA website at http://www.nda.ie. The other videos in this set can be found by searching for the tag accesstoheritageconference2012. The transcript for this video is available below.

Tom O'Neill's story -- Access to Historic Buildings
My name is Tom O'Neill. I live in Balbriggan. I'm visually impaired, my condition is retinitis pigmentosa, and I'm retired from work. That's my background. 
If the person, you know, that's giving the tour.. some people have a real gift to talk and a real gift to describe. The quality of the person is everything for someone who is visually impaired.  
I would say, straight up, that the provision of an audio-described MP3 player, as I would have experienced with Edinburgh Castle and Cardiff Castle and I would have experienced in the Madrid one, I haven't discovered one in Ireland, that's not saying they're not there, but I haven't actually discovered, so that being available, being on the website, that is available - if you want it. There was a small charge for them in all the facilities, but it was more a cover charge that, in case you walked out with it I think, so when you gave it back you got your money back, but that was fine. So, that would be my strongest recommendation I think.
Something that would have been hugely important for me and for somebody with partial sight would be the colouring at the edges of steps. There is a significant set of steps at the front here, as you come off the Luas to come into here. Now I don't know at this point in my life whether those steps have markings on them. That would be a plus for anybody coming into a building, but also it's a plus for any other building you are going into, if you like.
Those kind of things makes the trip into any building more enjoyable for a visually-impaired person. 
If I was to consider older buildings, newer buildings, and make a comparison between them, I think, one thing about an older building is -- there's always far better acoustics in older building's, whereas lots of the newer buildings would have an awful lot of tile floors, for instance, huge echo in them, lots of glass..
The older buildings have that plus to them, in that generally there's solid walls, they don't have an awful lot of tiling.. I like going in that kind of building because acoustically, you can pick up everything that's around you, almost always, yeah.