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Montreal aviation museum creates tour for visually-impaired

In collaboration with the Quebec Federation of the Blind, they welcomed 16 visually-impaired visitors to touch, feel and hear their way through Canadian aviation history.

“We heard from the Federation of the Blind that they would like to bring blind people here, so I volunteered for the job and put together this plan of what to do,” said 92-year-old Patrick Campbell, a volunteer at the museum founded in 1998.

Campbell and a team of museum volunteers put together a special tour that emphasized textures and touch.

“We started by saying: when people come to see our museum we say we’ll take you around to see everything but don’t touch anything.  With this group, we say you come around and we want you to touch everything!” Campbell told Global News.

The blind museum-goers felt small-scale and full-scale model planes all over, seeing them in their own way.

“You get the feel of it. How it was made, the size, you get how it was shaped, all the different information from that. How things moved, the different materials that they used and how they used the material,” said Lucio D’Intino, President of the Quebec Federation of the Blind.

D’Intino said visits like this are routine for the Federation.

“I try to take my group out to museums as much as possible. When we have museums like this where it’s hands on, unbelievable the information we get from it,” he told Global News.