In 2003, the European Year of Disabled People, Arts Council England’s New Audiences Programme invested £1.8m in 112 projects supporting change within arts organisations and tackling the barriers preventing disabled people from engaging with the arts.
The Programme found that, “Communicating clearly with people with all kinds of impairments is an area of continuing development. It requires a knowledge of appropriate formats and styles which not all arts organisations can lay claim to.” One of the major benefits of the initiatives promoted through the New Audiences Programme was that they gave people the opportunity to try out new approaches for engaging disabled audiences, which were regarded as an important niche market that most venues and artists wanted to tap into.
According to the Disability Rights Commission there are around 10 million people with a disability living in the UK. Ignoring the needs of such a significant portion of the community is simply not good business sense but it is only in recent years that the necessary research is being conducted to identify strategies for embracing diversity.
According to Jillian Barker, former chairperson of Signed Performances in Theatre (SPIT), the fact that more performances and shows now embrace diversity (i.e. theatres providing sign language interpreted performances, or an increase in the quantity of shows featuring differently abled performers, such as the Anjali Dance Company) means that now is also the time to look at ways for improving marketing of the arts to the disability sector. SPIT publishes its own newsletter which focuses on companies and organisations that have made a commitment to theatre that is accessible to deaf and disabled people.
On a broader scale one of the key ways in which marketers have been able to reach the disabled community is online. Arts Access UK has established itself as a one stop shop for differently abled people to find out about arts events in their area, and specifically those either aimed at disabled people or are taking place in venues that are fully accessible to all patrons. The site allows users to search by region and also by artform categories, such as digital content, drama, and education/training. A newly added section in the site contains recommendations of places to go for a drink or meal after the show. At time of writing there were only a handful of bars, cafes, pubs and restaurants (all of which have been recommended by disabled people) actually listed but as the section is still only new it is expected to grow rapidly.
Arts Access UK was established with support from Arts Council, England, the National Disability Arts Forum and the AMA, the peak body open to all arts professionals involved in bringing the arts and audiences together. Even though there are numerous sites that provide comprehensive coverage of arts events across the UK, Arts Access is significant because of the ease with which users can navigate the site (and because it lists happenings that have expressed a commitment to being disabled friendly). In 2004 the Disability Rights Commission estimated that 80 percent of websites were unusable by disabled people. Thankfully change is afoot.
Even major corporations like O2 recognise the need for websites that are friendly to all users. The telecoms giant recently partnered with web compliance experts Segala to provide a web accessibility accreditation scheme. The partnership is driven by commercial reasons as opposed to humanitarian. “There are 10 million disabled people in the UK with an annual spending power of £50 billion,” says Paul Walsh, Segala CEO. “O2 can extend its reach by providing a more accessible website which offers an improved user experience.”
Of course the web isn’t just good for arts marketing. Art collections can now be made available online, podcasts and streaming audio is booming, and the technology now exists to create monumental virtual libraries for the blind and print impaired. The challenges for accessibility to virtual information are still being identified and met. In the museum sector, long at the forefront of the struggle for disabled rights of access, strides are now being made to ensure better access and awareness of online museums amongst the disabled community. Professor Jonathan P. Bowen of South Bank University’s faculty of business, computing and information management says, “online disabled access is still a relatively novel field” but that as awareness of the issues continues to grow the needs of the whole online community will be met.
