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beacbeac — home

Born in galleries. Built with the people the plaques left out.

beacbeac didn’t start as a product. It started as a question in a Hamilton artist-run centre: what would it take for everyone to reach the stories on the wall?

The idea

Centre 3 for artistic + social practice conceived beacbeac as an accessibility-first way to share the stories in cultural and event spaces — co-designed from the first sketch with Deaf, Blind, Low Vision, Deafblind, and disabled community members. Not accessibility added at the end. Accessibility as the reason to build at all.

The build

Centre 3 won a Canada Council for the Arts grant to make it real, and brought in Christopher McLeod and Alex MacLean of BluHeron Interactive to build it — beacons in gallery rooms, stories arriving on visitors’ own phones, in their language, out loud if they wanted. It worked. And the more places it ran, the clearer it became that the idea was bigger than galleries: every public place is a collection.

Today

BluHeron Interactive builds and runs beacbeac from Hamilton, Ontario, with Centre 3 continuing as a steering voice — keeping the platform honest to the communities it was designed with. Canadian-made, Canadian-hosted, and still doing the one thing it was born to do: making stories reachable, by everyone.

Our promise

The accessibility-first character of beacbeac isn’t a phase of the project — it’s the deal. These commitments hold, in writing, wherever beacbeac goes:

  • The visitor experience stays free. Core accessibility features will always be available to visitors at no cost — never paywalled.
  • The communities that shaped it stay in the room. Before any change that could meaningfully reduce accessibility, we talk to Centre 3 first — and, where it makes sense, to the disability communities that co-designed beacbeac.
  • The promise travels with the platform. If beacbeac is ever sold, transferred, or licensed, the new steward assumes these commitments in writing as part of the deal.
  • We say what we did. Once a year, BluHeron shares a plain-language summary of the accessibility decisions made that year.

BluHeron Interactive

The team that builds and operates beacbeac — Christopher McLeod and Alex MacLean, Hamilton, Ontario.

bluheroninteractive.com

Centre 3 for artistic + social practice

The artist-run centre where beacbeac was conceived — and the steering voice that keeps its accessibility-first character at the centre.

centre3.com