Seeing a solution

Some arts organisations have one Sign Language (BSL) interpreted panto performance, many provide a small number of Captioned (CAP) or Audio Described (AD) performances, but a growing number of venues have been exploring how they can make use of more and newer technology to provide and grow audiences for accessible performances.

The Treasury’s Invest to Save budget and Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts funded the ‘See a Voice’ project, a joint STAGETEXT and VocalEyes initiative, which started in September 2006. The project has been working with a range of venues (27 in total) to develop in-house captioning and audio description services. With a focus on collaboration and organisational commitment, the project has supported development through training local practitioners, supplying equipment, training staff and bringing in disability equality, marketing and box office expertise. Between January 2008 and March 2009 participating venues held 104 CAP and 126 AD performances. The average number of attenders actively booking CAP and AD performances appears to be approximately six per performance. However, there is an increasing amount of anecdotal evidence which strongly indicates that audience members are attending captioned performances but choosing to not tell box office staff. An early success was the Access London Theatre project, managed by the Society of London Theatre and Theatrical Management Association, which now emails listings of CAP, BSL and AD performances taking place in London.

Whilst new technology is successful at raising awareness of what is available, it has been less transformative in terms of the actual booking. For the vast majority of organisations and patrons the safest booking method seems still to doing it in person. However, there are a handful of arts organisations which have rolled up their sleeves and found a way to enable registered users to book their own seats over the Internet, thus providing equality of choice. Gerard Swift, Box Office Manager at Birmingham Rep, explains how it planned and implemented its scheme, “We have been interested in enabling online booking for customers for AD/BSL/CAP for some time. We had an initial audit of our disabled audience in 2008 and discovered that nearly 50% of our disabled audience who responded to the survey described their disability as ‘other’. We [also] realised it didn’t make sense to create a scheme that only focused on accessible performance customers. After consultation with our website and ticketing site developers we created an access register and developed a process allowing customers not only to book specific BSL, AD, captioned and wheelchair spaces, but also to book their consessionary tickets and complimentary assisting companion tickets either online, in person or over the phone. Seventy percent of people who we originally identified as disabled customers and surveyed in 2008 have joined the register. The majority of bookings are still made by telephone or in person, but approximately 16% of our access register users are now booking their seats online, and we anticipate this to grow.” As Claire Saddleton, Project Manager of See a Voice, puts it, “Most successful organisations take a pride and ownership in offering these services, rather than seeing them as a chore. They start to think creatively around the issues and celebrate every patron who arrives.”