Accessibility in Digital Museums

Things are going well with research and the rough draft of my thesis. The majority of the literature review, concerns, benefits, etc sections of the paper are looking good. I have a lot of good research I would like to add to certain parts and details to others; but there is so much to discuss it is hard not to ramble on about a large section that isn't really all that important in the overall scheme of such an ambitious project.

One part of the paper I had planned to add was a small bit on accessibility. With the nature of digital content, it is rather reasonable to integrate something like Google tools to automatically generate captions for movies and read back text documents. That is easy enough. But another part of the paper is discussing how big data can benefit museums. By seeing what exhibits and objects are most viewed, discussed, and tagged, a museum can easily see what they should be focusing on for their core visitors.

But should we track data about accessibility access? If a visitor using the application simply wants to learn more and happens to blind or deaf, should we know? On one hand it is potentially useful information to see if such content should be getting more focus and better features, but it could also be an invasion of privacy if users want to remain anonymous. In the long run its simple to just have two check boxes, one to enable accessibility, and one to remain anonymous about it. I had not really considered how potentially big of a deal it could be on various levels. Interesting food for thought.