Facilitating or expanding access are fundamental goals of museum work in higher education, yet the term itself can be ill-defined and under-theorised. What is being accessed, by whom, and why, and what, most of all, does access consist of? We will consider experiences of access in a university museum context: Why has touching been framed as unmediated, basic, authentic, particularly accessible? Why, at the same time, is visibility framed as a synonym for accessibility? How does this impact learning with collections? Can access mean physical and temporal proximity, and what might it mean to put access on display? Can access literally be on display? Our session will also engage with the history and politics of access, accessibility and assistive technologies: What normative assumptions about people, their bodies, and their interactions with things and the world are queried, queered, overcome, or reinforced, in the recent history of access? Can we find a generative history of access through reading museum collections themselves, and can university museums be a place to give a critical account of the history, politics and phenomenology of access?