It’s crucial to take the steps to ensure your cultural events and activities are inclusive and accessible to everyone, including audiences with and without disabilities.
To help you get started in this process, we asked Appetite’s former freelance Access Officer Tammy Reynolds to share her expert tips with Artsbank.
Afterwards, check out the links and downloads sections of Organising for more useful Access reources.
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In The Beginning
Have access considerations from the beginning of the organisation process. Employ disabled producers, artists, volunteers etc in the team and work together on ensuring access is put in place with intent, not as a reaction. Attitude is Everything is organisation that works to deaf and disabled people’s access to live music and they have some great resources here.
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Chill Vibes
Relax your event! This makes it more accessible for neurodiverse or learning disabled folks. It also removes elements of pretention which sometimes puts off people who have never been to an arts event before. If you are indoors, keep the house lights on at a low(ish) level. Tell audience members they can come and go as they please. Have cushions on the floor. Ask the performers to summarise the show and give notice if there are loud noises, lighting changes, or if they’re going to interact with the audience. The best thing about relaxed events, is that these adjustments either don’t cost much or are free!
More tips about making your events ‘relaxed’ can be found here by the fantastic Jess Thom.
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The Doors
If there is an accessible entrance, everyone should use it, not just disabled people. It’s not a nice feeling to be separated from your friends or feel like an ‘other’. We don’t want special treatment, just the same experience as everyone else.
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Heads Up
Provide Access Info on your event webpage beforehand. Make sure you cover all the vital questions including:
Is it captioned?
BSL? (British Sign Language)
Level-access?
Relaxed?
How many stairs are there, if any?
Transport links?
Seated?
Battersea Arts Centre recently became the first fully relaxed venue in the world. They have fantastic access info on their website, take a look here.
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Access Angel:
Delegate an access role to someone who will be on site the entire time. This person can show people where the accessible toilet is, ensure the disabled person is safe, address any incidences of harassment the disabled person may experience.
Read an article where the organisers of Pussy Palace talk about safe spaces and how they recruited people specifically for this reason here.
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Training Montage Sequence:
Try to give everyone who is working the event (staff, volunteers, venue, security) disability awareness training.
Here is a fabulously detailed one from the Museum of London.
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Linda Evangelista
Learn about the Social Model of Disability. This is the way of viewing disabled people as disabled by society and the world they live in, not by their body or mind. For instance, if a wheelchair user can’t access the venue due to it being upstairs, it’s the stairs which are disabling the person, not the person. If a learning-disabled person can’t go to the rave due to the noise levels, it’s the noise disabling them from the rave, not them. Get rid of the stairs and turn the noise down. The party will be way better with disabled folks there – we are sick! Pun intended.
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Go Find Ourselves
Reach out to specific groups or organisations and offer free companion tickets to them during your marketing period. Social media platforms aren’t always accessible for people who use screen-reader technology, plus not everyone has access to a computer.
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Choices
Provide different seating options and have various different wheelchair-user friendly options instead of lumping them all together in one section. We don’t all know each other and sometimes we want to sit with our non-disabled friends!
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Honey, I Ate the Eval
During the evaluation process ask specific access related questions and return to the groups you invited and ask them to feedback. Then do the whole list all over again as access is a learning process and can always get better!
Written by
Tammy Reynolds
Tammy Reynolds is a Liverpool-based writer, performer, artist and access consultant. Tammy is disabled and is working on radicalising the notion of access and the attitude towards it. She has an alter-ego called Midgitte Bardot and performs all over the country.
Image: Weighting by Extraordinary Bodies, 2015, Stoke-on-Trent, Andrew Billinton Photography.
