Italian Folklore Museum — Alexa Accessibility Skills
Developed Amazon Alexa Skills for the Italian Folklore Museum, improving accessibility for visually impaired visitors through interactive voice experiences drawing on the museum's audio archive.
The Challenge
Museums face a persistent accessibility challenge: their collections are inherently visual, but significant numbers of visitors — including those with visual impairments — deserve access to the cultural content. The Italian Folklore Museum (Museo del Folklore) in Tuscany had an audio archive of cultural material but no way to make it accessible conversationally.
Voice interfaces offered an opportunity: Amazon Alexa Skills could transform the museum’s audio content into an interactive experience accessible to anyone, including visually impaired visitors, without requiring the museum to invest in bespoke hardware.
The Approach
We designed and built the Alexa Skills for the museum, integrating with their existing audio content infrastructure. Key work included:
- Designing the voice user interface (VUI) — the conversational flow that lets visitors explore the museum’s content through voice commands
- Building the Alexa Skills using the Alexa Skills Kit SDK, handling the intent architecture and slot filling for natural language navigation of the museum’s collection
- Integrating with Spreaker APIs to access and serve the museum’s audio archive content dynamically
- Python and Node.js backend development to handle the skill logic and content management
- Accessibility testing with visually impaired users to validate the conversational design
- Working with the museum team to curate content and define the visitor journey through voice interaction
The interaction design was as important as the technical build: a voice interface that requires precision commands fails accessibility users. The skill had to understand natural, approximate requests.
The Outcome
- Alexa Skills live for the Italian Folklore Museum
- Visually impaired visitors able to engage with the museum’s collection through voice
- Museum’s audio archive made accessible via Spreaker integration
- Interactive cultural experience available on any Alexa-enabled device
Technologies & Methods
Alexa Skills Kit SDK, Python, Node.js, Spreaker podcast API, AWS Lambda, voice user interface design, accessibility testing, conversational flow design.
About this engagement
This was a Build engagement with a strong accessibility purpose: creating voice interfaces that make cultural heritage accessible to visitors who would otherwise be excluded. The combination of technical implementation and thoughtful UX design determined whether the skill worked for its intended users.