Prioritising Accessibility Means Asking the Big Questions
Over the past few months, I’ve been part of and hosted discussions about accessibility in arts and culture. I attended a training session facilitated by Open Arts on communicating with neurodiverse audiences, as well as a Deaf Awareness Training session held by University of Atypical. On top of those, thrive held our first Bottomless Brunchmarking session of 2025 back in February on the theme of inclusive audiences. We welcomed some incredible people from arts organisations all across Northern Ireland to University of Atypical’s Ledger Studio to talk about all things access and inclusion. I learned a lot from all three conversations – but all three were completely different. I haven’t come to any conclusions, and there are some things I am more confused about now than I was before. I feel uncomfortable with the way things are for d/Deaf and Disabled people and unsure of how best to change things for the better. I don’t think this is a bad place to be.
Accessibility training
At both of the training sessions, I was challenged to come out of my comfort zone. I left the Open Arts training session troubled by how inhospitable the world (and more specifically the workplace) can be for neurodiverse people. At the University of Atypical training, I was asked to stand in front of a room full of people and try lipreading for the first time, which drove home to me how incredibly stressful and isolating this experience can be for d/Deaf people.
I left both sessions feeling better-informed, but with lots of uncomfortable questions percolating in my head. Where had my preconceptions and biases come from, and could I ever really unravel them? If I felt so uncomfortable trying to lipread under pressure for 5 minutes, how uncomfortable are d/Deaf people who have no choice but to do so? If the world of work is inherently inhospitable to neurodiverse people, where do we start when it comes to fixing this?
Bottomless Brunchmarking learnings
At the Bottomless Brunchmarking session, we heard practical advice from the organisations working towards becoming more inclusive and accessible every day. We used some of our findings from the IMPACT research as a jumping off point for the discussion – and we got some useful and challenging feedback. Data is great for writing the start of your audience’s story – but there’s a lot more work that goes into working out the conclusion. When someone indicates on a survey that they identify as d/Deaf or Disabled, there’s only so much we can learn from that about their needs. In our IMPACT survey, we ask about the nature of the respondent’s disability too, and while this is useful information too in terms of the access provisions organisations should prioritise, this too can only tell us so much, and we should avoid jumping to any conclusions.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, because the word ‘Disabled’ can mean many things – and we shouldn’t assume that one d/Deaf or Disabled person’s needs are the same as another’s. As I learned at the Deaf Awareness training, within the d/Deaf community, needs and preferences vary hugely from person to person. As was highlighted at the Open Arts training, the term ‘neurodiversity’ can apply to ADHD, Autism, OCD and more.
Challenging preconceptions
If there’s anything our Brunchmarking discussion and the training sessions taught me about accessibility, it’s that challenging ourselves is key when it comes to best practice. It’s essential we challenge our preconceptions when it comes to including d/Deaf and Disabled people in arts and culture, and that we challenge ourselves as organisations to go beyond mere box-ticking exercises and to fully integrate accessibility and inclusion into the heart of our practice.
This is, of course, easier said than done. There’s a real fear of getting it wrong, which can often lead to doing nothing for fear of messing it up. We hear often that inclusion is a ‘touchy’ or ‘difficult’ subject, and that one misstep could really upset someone, which is partially true. Our IMPACT research has shown that audiences with disabilities engage less frequently with arts and culture, and are more acutely impacted by the cost-of-living crisis. They already have a lot to contend with before they set foot in your space – it's important we work hard to make their time there enjoyable. Positive experiences are felt more deeply by d/Deaf and Disabled audiences too - our research has shown that they are more likely to report feeling safe, comfortable, proud and transported after attending arts and culture than non-disabled audiences.
It’s vital that we put ourselves in the shoes of our d/Deaf or Disabled audience members. One Brunchmarking attendee described an exercise wherein you should pretend you know absolutely nothing about your organisation and are attending an event or looking at your website for the first time. Would you be able to comfortably navigate the space, access everything you needed, fully engage with the event? This can be an eye-opening exercise, and a great place to start – not everyone is starting from the same place as you are.
There’s also a fear of asking for help, because you might feel as though everyone else already knows what they’re doing. You might feel you’re the odd one out. Admitting that you’re unsure about something can feel like drawing attention to your shortcomings or admitting ignorance. No one wants to be part of the problem, we don’t want to be one of the many barriers to inclusion for people with disabilities, but sometimes it can be difficult to find a place to start. The reality is we can’t untangle ourselves from hundreds of years of stigma overnight. It takes a concerted effort, and it takes asking uncomfortable questions – not of our audience members or our employees, but of ourselves.
An ableist society
A lot of the access barriers for people with disabilities are completely out of our control as arts organisations. That might feel defeatist to admit, but it’s true. It’s also true that those barriers are mitigable, unfair, and shouldn’t exist. The social model of disability sums this up pretty well. The model puts the onus on the ableist society we exist in to change, rather than on the disabled individual. It explains that ableism exists on both institutional and individual levels, from ‘inaccessible public buildings to unusable transport systems, from segregated education to excluding work arrangements’.
Some of these are within our power to change – we can make our buildings accessible where possible, and we can strive towards being accessible workplaces. But it doesn’t stop there – if we care about our disabled audiences, we must care about them all the time. We can’t shrug our shoulders at the other structural barriers – we need to go to bat for our disabled audiences wherever and whenever we can. This means lobbying for change where possible and letting your organisation’s stance be known. We all have a shared responsibility, policymakers included, to understand the reality of how things are in NI, and to improve on it. To be truly inclusive, we should strive to create a space where disabled visitors and staff know they’re not just welcomed but advocated for and included in every step of the decision-making process.
