Every place has stories.
Make them accessible to everyone.
beacbeac is an open platform for parks, festivals, trails, main streets, museums — any place people gather. Attach stories to the places that hold them, and they reach visitors automatically as they approach: in their language, read aloud if they choose, no searching, no scanning.
How it works
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Mark the places.
Place small, weather-resistant, battery-powered beacons anywhere with a story to tell — a trailhead, a stage, a storefront, a sculpture. No wiring, no Wi-Fi, no infrastructure at the site.
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Attach the stories.
Photos, descriptions, and audio — written once, delivered in English, Spanish, and French, with text-to-speech built in. Manage everything from the web, from anywhere.
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Visitors just walk.
As people approach, the story arrives on their phone — automatically. No maps to decode, no plaques to squint at, no QR codes to hunt down.
One platform, every kind of place
The festival
Three days, forty artists, a site that didn’t exist last week. Drop beacons at every stage and installation, attach artist statements and schedules, and tear it all down on Monday — the stories redeploy next year in an afternoon.
The trail
Interpretive signage without the signs. Waypoints along a riverside path share what the eye can’t see — the history under the bridge, the species in the wetland — and speak it aloud for visitors who can’t read a trailside plaque, in the language they choose.
The main street
Every storefront has a past. A business district or heritage walk becomes a self-guided tour: histories, architecture, voices of the neighbourhood — curated by the people who know it best.
The museum
Where beacbeac was born. Wall text that reads itself, in three languages, arriving as visitors approach each work — with the beacon health, battery monitoring, and multi-site management that professional collections demand.
Gardens, campuses, community centres, sculpture parks — if people move through it, beacbeac can help them hear it.
Built access-first
Access isn’t a feature we added. It’s the reason this exists. beacbeac was co-designed with Blind, Low Vision, Deaf, Deafblind, and disabled community members — so autonomous, personalized access to your space isn’t an afterthought. It’s the architecture.
- Nothing to hunt for. Stories arrive as visitors approach. No hard-to-find QR codes, no app-menu spelunking, no tiny map pins.
- Listenable by design. Every story can be read aloud with built-in text-to-speech — for low-vision visitors, tired eyes, or anyone who’d rather look up than down.
- Three languages, one workflow. English, Spanish, and French delivery from a single content entry.
- Made with screen readers, not just tested against them. The app is built for VoiceOver and TalkBack from the ground up.
- Standards, not vibes. beacbeac helps venues, events, and temporary outdoor installations meet AODA and modern accessibility standards.
For the people who run public places
- Parks & recreation departments
- Festival and event producers
- Municipalities, BIAs, and main-street organizations
- Heritage, conservation, and trail organizations
- Museums, galleries, and cultural institutions
- Campuses and community spaces
Run it with the team you have
- A real dashboard, not a science project. Manage beacons, stories, and status from the web app — from the office or the field.
- Know before visitors do. Beacon health, battery, and connection monitoring tell you when a unit needs attention.
- See how your space is used. Anonymous engagement analytics show which locations draw attention, how long visitors stay, and which beacons are healthy — evidence for your board, your funders, your next grant.
- Every organization is its own tenant. Your content, your team, your roles — isolated and secure.
- Works offline, syncs when you’re back. Built for basements, trails, and festival fields, not just gallery Wi-Fi.
- AI when you want it. Optional AI-assisted descriptions give small teams a head start on content.
- Canadian-made, Canadian-hosted. Built in Hamilton, Ontario; your stories and visitor data live in a Canadian data region.
Born in galleries, built for everywhere
beacbeac is by BluHeron Interactive, in collaboration with Centre 3 for artistic + social practice — developed hand-in-hand with cultural institutions and co-designed with Deaf and disabled communities to make art more reachable. That work taught us something bigger: every public place is a collection, and every community deserves access to it.
Read our story![The beacbeac app splash screen: the wordmark with 'Access Amplified' and the tagline 'Art that finds you', presented by centre[3] for artistic + social practice](/screens/01-splash.png)