Shining a light on accessibility in exhibitions

At the Victoria and Albert Museum, accessibility and preservation go hand in hand – and nowhere is that more evident than in our current Design and Disability exhibition. Each month, on the final weekday, we host Lights Up days, where lighting levels in the exhibition are increased so as to make displays more accessible to visitors without compromising the long-term care of the objects on show.

Simply switching on the full maintenance lights would have been an option – however this would take the exhibition out of its intended aesthetic and feel. Lights Up is the way that we try to retain the gallery atmosphere but with enhanced lighting that improves clarity and legibility for many visitors. When planning our exhibitions we consider that access needs differ, and that lighting plays such a critical role in how we all experience design.

But how can we raise lighting in an exhibition without putting objects at risk?

At the V&A, lighting is usually carefully calibrated to remain within a fixed level, measured in lux – a unit that describes how much visible light hits a surface of an object. Light can damage organic materials over time, causing colours to fade and surfaces to degrade in ways that normally irreparable. That’s why we assign each object a cumulative light budget – the total amount of light exposure it can safely receive over the course of an exhibition. These budgets are based on several factors: how sensitive the object’s materials are to fading or deterioration, how much risk we’re prepared to accept, and our responsibility to preserve the object for future generations. By staying within these limits, we can display our collections safely while still sharing them with the public today.

For Lights Up, our preventive conservation team worked closely with exhibition staff and lighting designers to rethink how that budget is used. Instead of seeing lighting as a fixed level, we treated it as a flexible resource over time. We calculated how much higher the light levels could go – and for how long – while still keeping within safe exposure levels for each object. You might notice on the graph below that we still have a little light budget left – even after the Lights Up days – this unassigned budget factors in the light we expect the objects to receive during installation and maintenance.

The result is a targeted increase: on Lights Up days, light levels are raised by 25% for text and graphic panels, and by 10% for the objects themselves. While this might not seem like a lot – it offers a significant difference in visitor experience – especially for those who might struggle to read labels or perceive details under lower lighting.

Design and Disability explores how design can empower, include, and reflect a diversity of experiences. Through Lights Up, we’re putting that ethos into practice – not just in the stories we tell, but in how we choose to tell them.

Lights Up days are on the last Thursday of every month, including 18 December 2025 and 12 February 2026.