Juliet England: A grand (and accessible) day out at Hampton Court

Every deaf person has been there. You pitch up at a gallery, museum, stately home or some other place of historic interest and a grand day out rapidly seems a little less grand once you think about how completely inaccessible most audio guides and tours are for us.

In the past, I’ve tried standing near the guide, but of course you don’t always catch everything. It’s exhausting. And I gave up on those audio guides a long time ago.

Now Hampton Court, obviously a massive tourist draw, is trying to make life easier with a new kind of digital visitor guide (DVG), developed in-house at the palace and specifically aimed at those with a hearing loss.

When I was invited to try it out, it was a decision requiring a good deal of thought lasting, ooh, at least two whole minutes.

And so I rocked up there one cold, bright Tuesday lunchtime. I’d been once or twice before, decades ago, but had completely forgotten just how magnificently beautiful it is.

The DVG, a little larger and heavier than a standard mobile phone, was initially a little tricky to get used to. For a start, there are two options – English and Sign Language (and this was something we discussed at length in the focus group later that afternoon) – but the English option was more of a standard audio guide. So this could have been clearer.

It also took a little time to get used to the various menus, but once I’d grasped how the thing worked, I was beetling around different rooms like a pro. I wasn’t sure how someone without a basic grasp of using technology such as a mobile phone would have fared, but then that’s always the case with a gadget like this.

Essentially, each room you visit has a new film, lasting a couple of minutes or slightly longer, and there is BSL interpretation, audio and English subtitles of the speaker’s words on each. (One speaker per clip.) The information is identical to the standard audio guide, allowing families and other groups to walk around at the same pace even when using different guides.

It was easier to read the subtitles holding the device in a landscape position, but generally they were no harder than the text I read on the TV every day. It was slightly fiddly then turning the gadget around to access the menu and navigate to the next clip, but no matter.

You can turn the sound and subtitles off on the DVG, but not, currently, the BSL. Again, the rights and wrongs of this were thoroughly thrashed out at the post-tour focus group discussion.

I did two tours – one of the kitchens, and another of the Baroque part of the palace, called the Georgian Experience. The former was fascinating, with the clips covering the boiling house, roasting room and so on. There was also a vivid description of how busy the courtyard outside would have been in Tudor times as servants and carts delivering supplies came and went. They also stressed the intense heat of the area, with multiple cooking fires in the kitchen.

The tone of the tours was warm, lively, informative and non-patronising, with about the right level of detail for what I was seeing. It was mildly bewildering when the speaker appeared to introduce a historian (say Lucy Worsley) and then just quoted their words; Worsley herself was nowhere to be seen. But that’s a minor quibble.

By the equally mesmerising Georgian Experience, I was whizzing through the clips in the right order as you’re supposed to. (Thought it’s possible to go back to any you’ve missed.) The various chambers, costumes, paintings, card tables and so on were all exquisite, and the guides continued to give a good sense of the incredible history of the place.

Another nice feature of the DVG is the Discover More extra films, where you can choose to watch a bit more detail about, say, a particular ceiling or fireplace.

For this part of the palace, at one point the list of rooms to walk through looked so long I wondered if I’d complete them all. However, as some of this section of Hampton Court was temporarily closed, it wasn’t possible to see everything anyway.

It’s not always easy trying to walk around with a device in your hand and a map, and read while studying what you are seeing. But it’s hard to see how that could ever be overcome.

I hope this project is developed to cover all areas of Hampton Court. Equally, I wish more places like it would do more to include deaf people.

Judging by the responses of my fellow focus group members, reactions to the DVG were broadly highly positive, albeit with some suggestions for improving the user experience. (You can always rely on us, after all, to give a spirited opinion.)

Hampton Court Palace is taking action on the feedback given, so the device has just been ‘soft launched’ for now while the product is being perfected.

So, a grand day out indeed. Who knows, I may even have been inspired to start reading Wolf Hall.