Disability

Stagetext, a Colchester-based deaf access charity, has received a £20,000 grant from the National Lottery Community Fund.

The funding will go towards a community outreach project raising awareness of deaf access to arts and culture in the South East of England.

The project will see Stagetext’s team of ambassadors build relationships with deaf groups and deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing people across the area to spread the word about accessible events.

Stagetext says approximately 4.3 million, or one in three, people in the South East are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing and could benefit from captions and subtitles at live events in theatres, museums and other cultural venues.

Melanie Sharpe, CEO of Stagetext, said the charity’s research found 77% of people are in favour of venues offering more deaf accessibility via captioning and live subtitled performances and events to deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing audiences.

“By helping to spread the word about theatre captions and live subtitles for museum talks and tours, we can bring more people to arts and culture,” Sharpe said. “It’s not only transformative for those that are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing, but it makes economic sense for the venues too.”

The organisation behind Vault Festival has announced plans to move into a new venue in central London to host its next festival in autumn 2024.

Vault Festival of live performance has taken place at The Vaults, a theatre and creative space beneath London Waterloo station, since 2012. Earlier this year, the venue announced it would no longer host the event, putting its future in doubt.

Vault says its new multi-space venue will be a “thriving artistic hub” located in a vacant space in Zone 1. Due to open in spring 2024, it will host “new creative ventures” in addition to the yearly festival and will be aimed at supporting early-career artists. 

The company is currency fundraising for access equipment in the new space.

Vault Director and Co-Founder Andy George said: “One of our non-negotiables for our new home was ensuring we have step-free access so more people can enjoy the work of our wonderful artists. But we don’t want to stop there. We want to install access tools throughout the building so that artists and audiences who are d/Deaf, deafened or living with sight loss can enjoy everything we and our artists do.”

He added: “We are pumped to have found a new home for VAULT following a challenging few years.”
 

A new describing art guide aims to support art galleries and museums to make their collections more accessible for blind and partially sighted people.

The guide was launched by Sight Loss Councils (SLC) and funded by the Thomas Pocklington Trust. It was developed by East Sussex SLC in collaboration with Zoom Arts and Royal Collection Trust.

“Blind and partially sighted people also enjoy accessing art and museums. However, this can often be inaccessible to us,” said Iris, a member of East Sussex SLC and a volunteer.

“This is why we are working alongside arts organisations to make this happen. 

“We hope that our resource will enable staff to better understand how they can describe art with confidence to someone with sight loss and that it’ll break down some of the barriers about communicating with blind and partially sighted people.”

She hopes the guide will encourage galleries and museums to actively promote their ability to offer audio described tours.

Amy Stocker, Access and Inclusion Manager for Royal Collection Trust, said the resource “should make people much more confident when communicating with blind and partially sighted people”.

“Hopefully this means more vision impaired people will have access to art and engaging with arts and culture,” she added.