Visual Art: Accessible Tours at the Hugh Lane Gallery

Join guide Aoife Convery on this Friday morning tour.

In this monthly programme for people with a hearing impairment the tours will focus on either highlights from the Hugh Lane Gallery collection displays, the Francis Bacon Studio, the Stained Glass Room, the Sean Scully Gallery or the temporary exhibitions programme.

For these tours, we use audio description devices as individual loop devices which connect with a microphone headset worn by the tour guide, that can transit to the loop devices. They can then be used by people with hearing aids to connect to or for those hard of hearing but who don’t have hearing aids, they can use their own or ADI’s earpieces.

These tours will take place each month:
Friday 22 March at 11am
Fri 26 April at 11am
Friday 24 May 11am 

This event is free, but booking is essential through the Hugh Lane website.

Information on the T setting and Tours
It is necessary to have access to your T setting on your hearing aid to connect to the tour guide equipment.

Not all hearing aids actually have the T setting as part of their standard functions. However, the majority of hearing aids provided by the HSE do have the T setting available. The hearing aids need to be programmed by the audiologist to include the T-coil program/Loop program/T setting. Then the hearing aid user needs to understand how to access that program option, which is usually through pressing a button on their hearing aid or selecting this program from a drop-down list on an app on their mobile phone.

Many hearing aids now have Bluetooth programs or Bluetooth compatibility access as standard, however, these tend to be designed to function with brand-specific products and are not compatible with the equipment being used during this tour.

Images courtesy of the Hugh Lane Gallery.
Edgar Degas ‘Beach Scene’, Maud Cotter, ‘A consequence of a dappled world’, and Sean Scully, ‘Red Shore’.