Designing Accessible Interactive Software for Space Science Exhibits: Enhancing Inclusivity in the NASA Psyche Mission Display

Public interactive kiosk exhibits serve a diverse audience on a shared, unattended device with no persistent user accounts. Visitors bring a wide range of abilities, backgrounds, and levels of technology familiarity, yet accessibility is rarely treated as a design priority for exhibit interfaces. The Psyche 15A Spacecraft Exhibit, a touchscreen kiosk installed at Arizona State University (ASU) to educate the public about the NASA Psyche Mission is one of these exhibits and through user feedback was found to provide limited access to users with disabilities. All HTML pages carried generic placeholder titles, content images lacked meaningful alternative text, no semantic landmark structure existed in the site, and interactive buttons had no accessible name. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a modular accessibility layer for the Psyche exhibit in ASU’s Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4 (ISTB4). The module delivers three-step font scaling (100%, 150%, and 200%), a high-contrast mode toggle, a WAI-ARIA compliant settings panel dialog, semantic landmark structure across all pages, ARIA labeling for all interactive controls, and overflow-safe text rendering at scaled sizes while leaving refactoring of pages at a minimum. Visitor survey data show a 14% improvement in overall experience scores after implementation. The paper situates this work within the inclusive HCI and museum exhibit accessibility literature and identifies remaining limitations and future directions.