Checklist A – Main conference checklist
Checklist B – Venue checklist
Checklist C – Accessible toilets checklist
Checklist D – List of items to check before and on the day of the conference
Briefing Note 1 – Accessibility guidelines for presenters, facilitators and workshop/syndicate leaders
Briefing Note 2 – Briefing note for venue provider
Example Document 1 – Location map and directions
The purpose of this guide is to advise conference organisers about best practice for ensuring that conferences are accessible to disabled people, and about how to make sensible and informed decisions when assessing both the accessibility of conference venues and the conference arrangements themselves. The guide can also be used when arranging other similar events such as training events, although in those circumstances there may be additional considerations to be borne in mind that are not addressed in this guide.
This guide is not intended to cover all the steps involved in arranging a conference. We include only those steps where accessibility needs to be considered. Some steps, such as engaging speakers, are not covered at all.
What this guide sets out to do is to highlight steps that typically need to be taken to ensure that a conference is accessible to disabled people, together with an explanation of why such steps are important in terms of accessibility. The guide contains a set of checklists and briefing notes to be used as part of the planning of a typical conference, during the conference itself, and after the event. Some of the points relating to accessibility that we have included may not be relevant to your conference; equally, there may be some points that we have not mentioned that you will need to consider in the circumstances of the particular conference that you are organising.
This is an evolving area, and we believe that this is the first time that a project of this type has been undertaken. We welcome constructive criticism and feedback, which should be sent to info@cae.org.uk.
Various people will be involved in the organisation of a conference and it can be difficult to distinguish them. We have adopted the following terms:
One of the major catalysts for accessibility has been the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), which makes it unlawful to discriminate against disabled people, and requires providers of services to make reasonable efforts to ensure that disabled people can make use of their services. The DDA is an extremely complex piece of legislation, as the box below explains, and exactly how it applies in particular circumstances will not become clear until some cases start to come before the courts.
Events such as conferences do not fit easily within the framework of the DDA, as there is not just one service provider, as there is in the case of, for example, a shop or a theatre. Instead, there are a number of different organisations that provide services, and it is likely that each of them owes differing duties to the conference delegates, depending upon the services that are being provided: the conference facilities, food, overnight accommodation, the conference organisation, the speakers and so on.
In the light of such uncertainty, this guide deliberately does not address the issue of how the DDA applies to the organisation of a conference, but instead concentrates simply on explaining on how the conference can be made as accessible as is possible. If the recommendations contained in this guide are carried out, it is likely that the duties under the DDA that are owed by the conference organiser to people with disabilities will be addressed as a matter of course. Furthermore, were a disabled person to make a complaint under Part 3 of the DDA, it is likely that the court would give credit to the conference organiser for having used a guide of this nature.
The summary of the DDA that follows is taken from Making access to goods and services easier for disabled customers: a practical guide for small businesses and other small service providers, prepared by the Centre for Accessible Environments for the Disability Rights Commission and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. You can download the complete document from the Publications part of the DRC’s website at www.drc-gb.org. It is indexed as document SP5.
In addition to duties under Part 3 of the DDA, employers who employ fifteen or more people have similar duties towards their employees under Part 2 of the DDA, and these duties are to be extended to all employers from 1 October 2004.
The Disability Discrimination Act introduces new laws aimed at ending the discrimination that many disabled people face. It affects virtually everyone who provides goods, facilities and services to the general public whether paid for or not.
The DDA defines disability, and identifies who is protected under it. The definition is broad: 'a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities'.
Part 3 of the DDA introduces duties on service providers in three stages:
Many service providers are already choosing to make improvements to their premises in advance of 2004. This is a sensible approach, as with foresight many changes can be incorporated into routine maintenance or refurbishments between now and 2004.
From October 2004, where a physical feature makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled customers to make use of a service offered to the public, service providers will have to take measures, where reasonable, to:
An added complication to ensuring accessibility in the case of conferences is that there may be a number of different people and organisations involved in the process: a professional organiser, booking agencies, the chair, the speakers and the client itself, for example. For a more complex function, there may be many more people involved. Even without taking the complexities of the DDA into account, there are opportunities for important responsibilities to be overlooked, or for the dividing line to become blurred between the parties. One of the first tasks to be allocated, therefore, is responsibility for ensuring that the issues raised in this guide are suitably addressed, but even then you have to pay close attention to the arrangements as they progress. You may delegate to another person, or to another organisation, the responsibility for ensuring accessibility, but the only way of ensuring that the conference is actually accessible on the day is to monitor arrangements frequently and with a careful eye for detail.
Accessibility is a difficult concept to measure. It is possible to create an 'accessibility score' for a building by aggregating various factors, and perhaps by incorporating some weighting system to emphasise particular accessibility issues that are of greater value. However, this is of little practical assistance to individual disabled people who need to know whether they will be able to gain access to the building given their own individual circumstances. A building may score 70 per cent on such a system yet still be inaccessible to a large number of people.
Similarly, it is possible to produce any number of different 'tick box' checklists that will enable a building, or an event, to be checked against specified criteria. This may be a useful first step in assessing accessibility, but it is the thought process that takes place during the inspection, when the person conducting the inspection considers which of the issues are important in the particular circumstances, and how any obstacles can be overcome, that provides the real value.
With that in mind, this guide sets out the issues that a conference organiser needs to consider, from the initial planning stage to the day of the event itself. It explains why the issues are important, and provides additional hints to assist in ensuring accessibility.
Readers must bear in mind that the majority of conference accommodation is not yet totally accessible. To some extent, any deficiencies can be overcome by good management, and by providing full information to visitors (see the following paragraph), but there will in many cases be trade-offs to be made between different issues. For example, the guidance in Checklist B (venues checklist) states that ideally there should be at least two accessible toilets available for delegates, in case one of them is out of use on the day. This is still a counsel of perfection, as there are currently very few conference facilities in existence that have more than one accessible toilet.
Full information is invaluable to all visitors, and particularly to visitors with disabilities. Many of the questions in Checklists A and B will serve as reminders for the sort of information that visitors will find helpful, both when travelling to the conference and during the conference itself. Remember that a 'No' answer to one of the questions about the venue does not necessarily mean that the venue is unsuitable. It may be quite suitable so long as visitors are given full details in advance of the venue’s shortcomings.
Production team
This guide has been jointly produced by
Any comments or suggestions for improvements should be addressed to the Centre for Accessible Environments. Contact details are set out at the beginning of Checklist B.
Copyright in this guide is held by the three organisations listed above. Users may reproduce this guide for their own non-profitmaking purposes, provided that they do not remove this copyright notice or claim authorship of this guide, or any part of it, themselves.