Some of the most interesting places are the hardest to get into. A narrowboat with a low cabin. A cockpit suspended from a museum ceiling. A medieval crypt down a flight of stone steps. The objects and spaces that make a collection worth visiting are often the ones that physically exclude part of the audience.
Virtual tours don’t replace the visit. They sit alongside it, giving people who can’t reach a space, or can’t comfortably be inside it, a genuine way to see and explore what’s there.
We’ve been building this kind of access route for two decades, often as part of broader virtual tour projects rather than as standalone accessibility commissions. Three examples explain what it can look like in practice.
The Canal Museum, London
The Canal Museum has a Victorian narrowboat in its collection. The interior is tight by design, that’s what makes it interesting, and it meant visitors with mobility issues couldn’t get inside to see it. The boat itself is a historic object and can’t be altered. We built a virtual tour of the interior to run on a kiosk beside the boat, so anyone standing on the dockside could explore inside it properly.
The RAF Museum, London
The museum’s Percival Mew Gull, a 1930s British racing aircraft, hangs from the ceiling. The single-seat cockpit is physically unreachable for any visitor, disabled or otherwise. We produced a high-definition 360 tour of the cockpit interior and placed it on a kiosk beside the exhibit. Every visitor can now look around inside the aircraft, which previously only a handful of pilots and conservators had ever seen.
St Magnus the Martyr, City of London
St Magnus is a working Wren church with a rich interior and a congregation that uses the building daily. The steps at the entrance and the layout inside create real barriers for some visitors. The virtual tour gives anyone, anywhere, a way to explore the church at their own pace, whether that’s a wheelchair user planning a visit, a researcher abroad, or someone who simply prefers to look around without an audience.
Who this actually helps
Physical mobility is the obvious case, but it’s not the whole audience.
A virtual tour also helps:
- Autistic visitors and people with sensory sensitivities, who can explore a space in advance and decide whether and when to visit in person
- People with anxiety, who benefit from knowing what a space looks like before walking into it
- Anyone with a temporary injury or illness that has narrowed what they can reach
- Carers and companions planning a visit on someone else’s behalf
- Visitors with limited time, money, or distance to travel, including international audiences who would never reach the building in person
- Schools and educators using a space as teaching material when a field trip isn’t possible
This is broader than disability. It’s about people who, for one reason or another, can’t be in the room. A well-built virtual tour gives them a way in.
What about the legal side
The Equality Act 2010 replaced the older Disability Discrimination Act in October 2010, and it’s now the relevant law in Great Britain. It requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people aren’t put at a substantial disadvantage. Where a space genuinely can’t be made physically accessible, whether because of listed-building constraints, conservation rules, the nature of the object, or simple geometry, an alternative route to the same content can be part of how a provider meets that duty.
We’re not access consultants and won’t pretend to be. If you need a formal audit or detailed advice on what the Act requires in your specific case, that’s a job for someone who does it for a living. What we can do is build the tour itself to a high standard, so that the access route you offer is one worth offering.
Beyond the tour itself
A virtual tour doesn’t have to be a single thing on its own. It can sit inside a wider experience: a floorplan for orientation, audio description, captioned video clips, a clear text version of the content for screen readers, music or ambient sound where it adds to the place, or a guided walkthrough that takes visitors through the highlights in order. The right combination depends on the space and the audience.
If you’re thinking about this for your own venue
We build every new virtual tour to a WCAG 2.1 AA standard by default, with AAA delivery available where the brief calls for it. If you’re working out whether a tour could solve an access problem at your site, the accessible virtual tours service page covers how we approach the build. Or get in touch and we’ll talk it through.