The Medieval Museum had audio guide systems installed at the different exhibition stations. They did not work while we visited the museum but according to the staff, the devices used to work, and there were people who wanted to use it.
An Audio Guide is an alternative to a real human guide. They basically contains voice recordings that describe different exhibitions at the museum. It is usually easy to implement an Audio Guide system; the visitors just need a pair of headphones to make it work.
Audio guides are not the perfect solution, especially not for elder people. This is due to several things. First of all, elder people tend to have poor hearing, and this causes a problem when many Audio Guide devices do not have adjustable volumes. Secondly, it is not always easy to keep up with the pace of the recordings and understand all of it. In those cases, you can not pause the taping, or rewind it. And if you do not understand something from the recording, or want to know more about some of it, then, it is not possible to ask questions to the Audio Guide and get them answered. Consequently, it is reasonably more difficult to interact with a Audio Guide device than a real human being. Thus, Audio Guides are not as flexible as human guides. However, they do save the museum resources; Audio Guides can guide a lot of people at the same time at completely different places in the museum, which a human guide obviously cannot. And if the systems could be improved, perhaps so their volumes and paces can be adjusted easily according to the user’s preferences (by the staff or by the user), they would be better fitted for different types of users.
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