Accessible ​Events & Meetings​

Jonathan: Delighted to be with you all today. Hopefully you’re going to find this really, really useful. So, I’ve been doing this for a very long time, so feel free, also, the rest of my team, have been working in accessibility for a long time as well.

I’ve got Pete, I’ve got Yac. There are probably others from our team, consultancy team, on the call as well. So please pop those questions in the chat because there were some really interesting questions from people who registered for this already. Those I’m going to be covering, but the new ones from you today we would really appreciate. I wanted to start off talking about who needs accessible events and meetings and, if you like, what are the cost benefits here? And the key thing really is there are three potential audiences for people coming to your events, your meetings. It could be that you were doing this for customers of yours.

So it could be that you’re an organisation that creates things for lots of people. You put together a huge event to bring all of those people together. How do you make that accessible? It could be that you’re doing a presentation for a potential new client. Maybe you’ve done some work for them, and you’re trying to make sure that you deliver the results of that work in a compelling way. If somebody in that meeting had a disability, would they be able to get all of the information? And then the final thing is that you may have staff who have disabilities, who absolutely need all of your communications, all of your events, all of your meetings that happen in your organisation to be accessible to them. So that just gives us an idea of, if you like, the types of places that these events and the audiences that they may be for.

Why does accessibility matter? Just in case you need some more business case stuff. Because certainly from the questions people were asking about it. It’s about 25% of the UK population who have a permanent disability.And we are a real ageing society. So an additional 15% here in the UK have a progressive impairment, that’s about four out of ten people who may be consuming your digital products. And in this case, the events and the meetings that you have put together. In a slightly different way, they may have different communication preferences that fundamentally change the way they want you to communicate with them in these ways. So we’re going to be looking at that. And there are really three key aspects that we’re going to be looking at.

First one, preparation, we’re going to be looking at things like: access services, so captions, subtitles, you know, BSL, all of those sorts of things. How you choose your venues, if it’s an in person event; how you choose the tools that you use for webinars, for example. How you do invites and registration. We’re then going to look at communications, so pre-event communications. Communications at the event itself, so the presentations, but also post event follow-ups. Because those are actually really, really quite useful. And also, and it’s really important to get this, we’re going to be making sure that you look at this from the perspective that everybody can participate. So you have questions that you can put there in the chat at the moment. Those questions are really good.

That enables that Q&A to happen, in an environment where we’ve already got more than 100 people on the call. If we just put our hand up, it wouldn’t work. So it’s mechanisms to ensure that large numbers of people together are able to have a good experience. That’s what we are about today. And we’re going to be looking at that both from a Q&A perspective, but also things like, meetings, team meetings in your organisation, maybe breakout rooms or round tables at conferences, that sort of thing. So if that’s physical access and information access, just the last two. And it’s worth just noting these in because again, oftentimes it doesn’t happen. People who have a disability like to see themselves on your screens because that makes them feel included. If everybody on your website or in all of the images of people in the presentation that I’m giving to you right now, were white men, you would probably think that there was something wrong with my diversity policy, and you would be right.

It’s exactly the same when it comes to disability. We need to make sure that people are portrayed as being part of a user base, a customer base, an employee base that sort of thing. Finally, right at the end of the session today, we’re going to be looking at help and support. It is so easy to get this sort of stuff wrong. We all do it all of the time. How we recover from those situations and how we understand the needs of people who say I need it this way rather than that way, how we deal with those touch points are the key and the difference between a good and bad experience for people. So that’s what we’re about today. And the people we’re doing it on behalf of are not necessarily easy to handle. That’s because they all disagree on what the right way of communicating might be because there is a huge amount of diversity in the disabled population of the UK. Here are the stats. Please don’t try and write loads of stuff down. As Pete was saying earlier you’ll be able to get all of this recording and be able to come back to this.

The key thing to kind of see here is that whilst there are lots of people who have a disability, there are lots of disabilities in there. We’ve got people who have difficulty hearing, that will impact your events and meetings, difficulty seeing, difficulty getting around, whether that’s difficulties with hands, or using a wheelchair, something like that. We’ve looked people who are neurodiverse, who may, be sensitive to information coming in, in different ways, in different speeds. And we’ve also got a lot of people in here who are older, who may not necessarily be the key part of your workforce at the moment. But as we’re all going to be working longer and longer before retirement, are going to become more and more a key part of your audience. There are lots of people who need lots of different things. How do you handle that? Before we get to that, it’s just worth noting how good that is. Here are a couple of slides that we use normally to help organisations understand that hiring people with a disability can be a very good thing for their organisation. Yes, they may have different needs that may require some handling and some support that the organisation might not have done before, but actually they bring a diversity of thinking and viewpoint that can be massively valuable.

A couple of articles here on the screen, one in the Guardian about autistic employees giving companies an edge and innovative thinking. One from the New York Post, workers with disabilities bring a range of strenghts and assets especially around empathy and being able to get around things that maybe not necessarily had been created for them. So there is a lot that you can gain from diversity, but your questions illustrated your concerns about some of this, specifically around the costs of this and getting everybody in your organisation to agree that making your events and meetings accessible is a good idea. Here’s some of those questions that I’m going to look at today. How can we influence meetings that are being arranged by other teams or far more senior staff, without sounding rude or pushy? So that’s a really interesting question. Do you have any tips for how to ensure key decision makers see things from the perspective of someone with accessibility requirements? For example, tools to help people see what a visually impaired person sees? These are the sorts of things that people were worried about.

If I’m trying to get my boss and all of the people above them to understand how important this is, how do I get them bought in? The other side of that, and I think the thing behind all of this was, if this were easy and cheap, it wouldn’t be a problem. But these two questions on the right I think give the game away. How do you support deaf or hard hearing participants? BSL services seem to be very expensive and especially for lower budget events this may be difficult to do. For small community events, how do you determine what adjustments are feasible and practical to offer? This is from a volunteer organisation of a small monthly meet up of approximately twenty people with a low budget. These are not outlier questions. This is what this is all about really, which is: how do we include as many people as possible when sometimes the costs of that to us as an organisation can be substantial.

So from my perspective, while it would be lovely to be able to say every meeting and event is fully accessible by default, actually you need to justify the cost. And the best way that we know to justify the cost of accessibility in events and meetings is to ask people do they have any access needs. You will have been asked that when you signed up for this meeting on Eventbrite. There is the form that you did. So if you put something in that access needs box, that would have come through to us and we’ll have been trying to make sure that we can cope with those needs during this presentation. Now people will always prefer not to have to answer that question. But in practice they’re very used to doing so and I’m going to give you two examples as to how that is. The first one is: this is my nephew and my son at Wembley. My nephew uses a wheelchair, my son does not.

And whenever we go to Wembley with my nephew, his dad who is a past master at this because they go to lots of football grounds, phones Wembley and says “where are your accessible seats?” That is normal for anybody who needs those accessible seats to be able to see, again, because they’re using a wheelchair. Here’s the second example. About 10 years ago I was asked if I would like to be the chair of a charity that enables people who have difficulty hearing theatre, to be able to still go to the theatre because they caption performances.
When you go to a captioned performance, you actually have to say, because it’s really important for you to sit in the right seats so you can see both the screen where the captions are and what’s happening on stage. You need to see both to get a good experience. People who have a disability in general responds pretty well to that “Please let us know if you have any access needs” box.

So that enables you to be able to say to your boss, the reason we’re doing this is because actually there is there is demand from the people coming to our events. But here’s the thing, it’s really important when you ask, to also have a written policy of what you can and what you can’t provide to handle expectations. One of the questions that came through from someone who registered was saying, you know, we had, we created a form that encouraged requests for individual reasonable adjustments, beyond the norm for a face to face event.
And that enabled them to get a lot more people who had disabilities coming to that event. That’s great, but be careful of the expectations. I’m going to give you an example from my own personal experience.

So when I invited an autistic expert into the BBC where I was working, for a meeting with me to advise on the British Standard for Accessibility (BS 8878), he sent me two sides of A4 of bullet points of adjustments that he needed to meet with me to be comfortable in the room that we met. That included an acceptable temperature range, an acceptable loudness of the air conditioning, the type of food and drink that he needed. I wasn’t necessarily thinking I was going to provide any, but I needed to. He specified the colour of the walls and the exact background and text colour of anything that I presented or handed to him in that meeting. So it took me almost a day to ensure that I could have a meeting in which he was comfortable. That was very expensive on my time. However, it made BS 8878 one of the first digital standards in the world that actually consulted with a group of people who regularly get excluded from accessibility standards, so people who are autistic. You can see that sometimes you have to do a lot of work, but sometimes it can be worth it. So I just want you to sort of like balance those in your mind if you like, because you won’t be able to do everything, but the things that you can do can get you great results.

So the sorts of things we’re going to be looking at: access services policy, venue access policy and some stuff on accessible presentation guidelines, how to handle breakout rooms and interactions. And we’ll end with an event accessibility checklist that a number of people were asking for. So there will be a slide on there and you’ll be able to grab it. So preparation; we’re looking here say, access services and if you are the venues and the tools that you use for the events or meeting and how to invite people, register people for that. So we’re going to start off with the thing that you all wanting to know, which is about access services. So things like captions, BSL interpretation, that sort of thing. And the key thing here is this, you will need a policy on this. This will be one of the real expenses that are required for you to have an accessible meeting or event. And so the reason why I’m showing you stats here is because this gives you an idea of the number of people who might be coming to your meeting or event who have the need for these different services.

So captions, anybody who’s hard of hearing, has difficulty hearing what’s happening in the room would really appreciate captions. That can be people who are hard of hearing or that can be anybody in a room where the acoustics are not very good. So it’s really important to get these right. This is 11 million people in the UK who need this, it’s a huge number of people who have this as a disability and the rest of us who have this as a need every now and then when the acoustics aren’t great. If we compare that to the 25,000 people who need sign interpretation, you can see the reason why most organisations do captions and don’t do BSL interpretation at events. That’s the reason, for example, why we do not have a BSL interpreter on this particular webinar, because the number of people who need it is much less and the cost is much greater to have a sign interpreter.

Audio description – this is for people who are blind, who can’t see the slides, this is 340,000 people in the UK. So again, a lot more people who need sign interpretation, but a lot less than people who need captions. And finally, on the right here we have transcripts. So, obviously these are transcripts that happen afterwards, but about 12 million people in the UK really appreciate these, again because they’re either hard of hearing or maybe they just want to experience what happened at the event or meeting in a textual way. So it gives you an idea. The greater the number of people who will be helped, the more likely that you will be to spend the money. Now we go into where technology can help us. So the minimum case and for those of you who have no money for your events or whatever, this is what I would suggest. Think captions first because that’s the most sensible place to start.

You can turn on automated captions in any Zoom meeting, or if you’re not using Zoom and you’re using some form of platform, either digitally or you’re actually in an in person event, you can actually turn on captions in PowerPoint. If you are presenting to a room of people, you can actually do that with captions. You don’t have to pay, it’s all there in the product you’re already using. So that sort of thing may be helpful. But the accuracy of AI caption, so hopefully some of you may have noticed that we have captioner Denise with us today. She is a real human being. She is captioning this event. The reason she’s captioning it, not AI, is because she is better than AI for two reasons that I’m going to come on to. So the first one is this.

We have been playing around with Otter.ai for years and years. When I walk the dog every morning, if I have a good idea that I need to think about, what I do is I burble into Otter.ai and then I just cut and paste it into my to-do list, when I get back to the office. It’s mostly good but there are words that I use all of the time that it gets wrong all of the time, and I correct them every single day. And that’s annoying.

It doesn’t understand me. It just understands general people. It doesn’t understand my context, where all my content, the sorts of things that I talk about.
And it really should. Denise was sent this deck earlier today so she was able to look at some of the terms that I was going to be talking about. That hopefully means that the live captioning she’s doing right this very moment is better and accurate than AI could ever be because she knows what it is what I’m trying to say. Here’s the thing, whenever you’re using AI captions, transcripts, summaries, everyone’s using fireflies or those sorts of things. If my Otter that I use everyday misunderstands me often, then fireflies that is trying to transcribe a meeting between five people who may be not particularly happy with each other, and some of them may have different accents. To try and get all of that really accurate from fireflies, I would suggest not necessarily something you totally rely on.

So it’s worth thinking about the quality of the captions that you need because certainly for us that Hassell Inclusion, we do not want to be misquoted by AI. So most organisations that we work with have a number of policies that we help them create. This is the access services policy and it effectively says you’ve got a number of different types of event. Here are the examples of those things. It could be AGMs, town halls, product launches, information events, whatever they are. What is your standard practise, your default policy for how you are going to provide access services for different groups of people for those? It could be we do this sometimes, it could be we do this never. It could be we do this always. You know, to what level of quality. Say for example, I’m being captioned, but if you put something in the chat, the only way that will come through on the captions is if I or one of my team who are unmuted say it.

So it’s that sort of thing. Is it one way, two way, or all the rest of it? Final thing, and it’s just worth noting, people who are neurodiverse, especially those who are autistic and sometimes get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff, especially in conferences. So some form of calm room or calm event, with lower level lighting, that sort of thing, could be really helpful. Some of you may have experienced that in cinemas for example. So for in person events a few things for you to be thinking about. And the key thing really is, can people who have a disability get into and out of your venue? That’s things like the travel routes to the building, getting into the building; this is the one that everyone tends to forget until it’s a little bit too late. Can they get through security in that building? Can they then get to your event room, which will probably be on a different floor than the one they come in at? And they would need to be able to find the room. As I say if it’s a bigger a conference room that’s easy if it’s a meeting room not so easy. And then if they need to get out have you worked out an evacuation plan? Say, for example you have somebody, the first person who has ever visited your offices who uses a wheelchair, do you know how that wheelchair will impact a situation where they need to get out really really quickly? You should I would suggest.

There’s also the other spaces that matter at your event. Things like the exhibition spaces whether or not you’ve got a chill out room? Whether people can get into the auditorium, and yes whether they can get onto the stage? It is the most excruciating thing in the world to have invited a great person to address your event only to find that they cannot get onto the stage. Because there is no ramp or something like that. Can they get into the breakout rooms? Or is that part of what you are doing, actually out of bounds? And the last one, and I know it sounds quite hygiene factor as it were but accessible toilets and the ability to get to the toilet and back from the toilet, to everything else through whatever security systems that you’ve got are really really important to get right. The number of times there are boxes in front of the accessible toilet because no one ‘s used it for a while, which actually cause a bit of a barrier. That sort of thing you need to get rid of.

If we’re thinking about online events, and this would be the same if you were doing hybrid as well, it’s really the digital tool choices. So you’re not choosing a venue which will enable people to get there you’re choosing a tool that will enable people to be part of it. So things like, we’re using Zoom at the moment we could be using Teams, or Google Meet.
There are lots of sort of online meeting and conference mechanisms out there, you know gotameeting, SpotMe, vFairs loads of them. In our experience we find the simplest of the best so that’s why we use Zoom, because it is from our experience so far at least more accessible than most. And then if there is interaction so we’re doing it in the chat at the moment, but it could be we use a slido, a miro board as a white board in a meeting; there could be networking part of your event, is that accessible to everyone as well? What we would suggest is that you take the tools that you are considering using, put that tool ‘s name ‘space’ accessibility into Google, and see what comes up.

For example where we’re doing some really interesting work with miro. And initially we were: are they accessible? It is a really really hard thing to make an accessible white board, that it has drag and drop and post it notes virtual. And they’re doing unbelievably great work that most people don’t really know about. So that’s the thing to do are your tools going to help or hinder? You will have some form of access policy making sure everything is accessible for attendees and presenters for physical, for online, for hybrid. So the thing about hybrid normally is the acoustics of the thing that kills you, trying to make sure that if you’re at a big event, and you’ve got some people at the event and some people on hybrid, it’s always the QA that just drives everyone insane. Because you’ve got somebody who wants to ask a question, who can’t get a microphone quickly enough so they start asking the question; so the people in the hall maybe can hear them but certainly the people online can’t, and everything starts breaking down.

So actually there is both a way of setting this up in the best way, but also an etiquette that you need people to understand. One of the questions that was asked was, when people ask at physical events, should you ask them to give their name first before their question. And my answer will be yes because we can see all of your names on here, so if you ask a question in the chat I know it comes from a particular person you don’t have to say that. In a room of people especially in a hybrid situation it is useful to know who this person is, what company they’re from that sort of thing. It’s also interesting to just note that it could be that you have been asked to speak at somebody else’s event. The questions that you will be asking them, are do they, is it an accessible event? If it isn’t, what do you do? Do you just go we’re not doing your event if you’re not accessible, or you know where do you draw that line? That’s why it’s a policy that’s up to you to decide what you think is right.

Looking at registration systems for a moment, these are often normally out of your direct control so we’d suggest you always have a backup. For example it could be that you’ve got online registration and then badge collection at the event itself this little kind of, you know, there are people here they’re the backup my gut is that oftentimes as you’ve seen when you go into lots of places these days you have to use a kiosk and some of those kiosks, may not necessarily be the right height for somebody using a wheelchair that sort of thing. It could be that you’re doing stuff for webinars and things so it could be registration via Zoom, it could be registration via something like Eventbrite. The key thing is to have a line like this in there: “if you have any difficulties registering please contact us at here”. Because often times, so Eventbrite is really, really good, but they change the interface without telling us all the time. That means that the accessibility of Eventbrite goes up and down all over the place like a yo-yo.

So it’s a really good thing for us to say look it’s a convenient means for us to do this, and most of the time it works, sometimes maybe it doesn’t, let’s have a backup. That’s always a good way of saving your bacon in those situations. So if that’s setting things up how do we handle communication? So pre event communications, communications at the event, and post event. I’m going to give you an example that you probably either looked at or looked past when you signed up for this event today. This is the information about these webinars on Eventbrite and I wanted to give you an idea as to why we wrote this the way we wrote this. So here at the top it says join us at our free monthly webinar, brackets, live captions, so for us it’s really important for people to know that right from the beginning for other organisations maybe less, but for us, that’s the key thing that really helps a lot of people. Next thing if you have any difficulties registering, you know, help if you need it. There’s also joining expectations. So, OK, you’ve now registered, This is how you would expect to get the link so you can come to the the webinar, the directions so you can get to the physical event that sort of thing.

Set the expectations and also set post event expectations so this is being recorded it will be available on our website with captions and transcripts in about a week’s time. That helps two groups of people. First group of people may not want to do this live, they actually may want to actually have the ability to watch some of the video, come back at a different point, other people may be on the other side of the world. At the moment in Australia it is not the best time to be joining a webinar in the UK. So a lot of people from the other side of the planet, use our recordings because that is better for their time zone. So these are the sorts of things that are useful for people to understand, how they can have if you like different ways of experiencing the same thing. So what about the presentations or handouts in the event itself? Well the key thing here is you need to brief your presenters, it could be just your team, it could be other people from other organisations coming in, that you want the slides themselves and the experience of the presentation to be an accessible one. It could be that like Zero Project, for example, you require presenters to use your template. Zero Project over in Vienna happens every year the most amazing coming together of a lot of people from the disability community.

For them they do want everything to be totally perfect when it comes to accessibility. Part of that they say is you must use our templates for all of your presentations. Here’s the other side of this every presenter in the world hates that. Because they will need to take the presentation they’ve got in their brand and put it in another one and the size of text will be different, how much they can get on the slide will be different it’s just loads of work. It generally results in less quality and less fundamentally of their brand coming through. It’s all about Zero Project it’s not about me whatever organisation I’m coming from. We think a better way of doing things is to say you can use your own templates, but here are some guidelines that we’d like you to work with. What about video, if you’ve got video in the presentation you must do all of that captions and all the rest of it. Or you could rely on the access services at the event.

Again if I’m going to an event I normally do captions on everything that I do because it’s just good practise. But what I do is I ask them do you have a captioner at the event who’s going to be doing this anyway and do you have any facilities for people who are blind? I’ll come to that in a moment because I have a view on that one when it comes to presentations. Last thing and this is the thing that so if presenters hate redoing their slides for your template the thing they hate even more is you saying that you need all of their slides two weeks beforehand because (pause) and it just trails out. When I finished creating this presentation was half an hour before I started delivering it to you. Not five days ago, I’m far too busy to do that. And fundamentally if I did do that I would also have to update things because chances are some changes happened in the news, or whatever that I might want to put in here.
We’ve also said that these slides are ours. They are part of our intellectual property we don’t give them away so actually, giving them PowerPoints away to somebody is never going to happen. So everything would need to come through as a PDF that sort of thing.

It just gets really really fiddly so the thing I always ask about when it comes to accessible PowerPoint is: are you going to give the slides out? If you are yeah try and make sure they’re as accessible as possible in that format. But if you’re not you have something which is really useful. So accessibility is all about reasonable adjustments right? That’s me, I am your reasonable adjustment I am a real human being who is actually speaking through these slides. So if you can’t see anything on any of these slides at all, and we have a lot of blind people who come to these webinars, you will miss nothing, because I speak the important stuff on the slides myself. If there’s a video I can also live audio describe it. Because that’s what I trained to do years and  years ago. So for people who are blind that’s my way of doing things. You don’t need that those slides five days earlier. You should be able to get all of the important stuff because I speak it.

That also allows us for example to take the audio from our webinars and republish it as a podcast. You should be able to understand what we present in our webinars without reference to the slides. See what I mean? Useful. So for everyone else ensure the fonts are big enough to read and make sure your colour scheme has got good contrast. The sorts of things that we do. If you’re going to do handouts, just make sure that those handouts themselves are also accessible. Either you’ll be sending them to people or you’ll be printing them out. Word ‘s got an accessibility checker you can save, tag PDF format. A couple of things from people who asked what about people who are neurodiverse. They often get forgotten. I would agree. We did a research with National Autistic Society to try and make sure that doesn’t happen anymore.

Couple of things from that audience. For each page of a website provide a summary of the page and its service. Purpose, so the key thing here is to enable people to know what’s coming up.
So that they can say yeah I’m in the right place or I’m not. You’ll have seen at the start of the webinar I said what I was going to talk about. That’s helpful. Some other things are harder to handle. Limit the use of background images and decorative graphics. I guess our brand circles up here might be included in those. Because they can be distracting, yeah, but they’re also our brand, and everyone else seems to be fine with them. So how do we handle that? Some people want something some people want a different thing. Here’s the worst thing, people who want different colours backgrounds. Some people hate the fact that our slides are on a white background. They want it to be on a different colour background because that’s what they prefer. When I did that session for the person who was autistic at the BBC, I did everything for him because he was the one person that I was speaking to.

There are 126 people in the room I guarantee that you will all have different preferences. I cannot handle all of that in this webinar. It just won’t work and it’s exactly the same for any event. However… Personalisation is a lot more possible in post-event recordings. I can’t change the colour of slides and things, there isn’t enough money in the world. But what I can do is handle a couple of things, and we do do every single time. This is last month’s webinar if you thought I was talking too quickly, if you listen to it, because it’s a recording, you can speed it up or slow it down to whatever speed you want. So in the session itself you will have a certain amount of time to get across whatever it is you want to say. You pick the speed and then if you record it, people can actually change that speed to whatever they want. We also have a transcript under it that allows people to say yeah, but actually I wanted it in French, well here is the transcripts you can pop that into Google Translate completely for free and get the whole thing in French. Or you can pop it into your favourite AI summarisation tool and get it summarised. Whatever it is that you want after the event you can do great things, so it’s really important to think about that.

Because you can do more for accessibility after the event most of the time than you can during. So key thing here there’s a QR code and a link on the screen, if you have people who want to know how to get your PowerPoints or your word documents accessible, the content in those, we have some free training coming up that we can make available to you. And it’s on June 2nd, June 3rd totally free, it’s in the afternoons UK time. If you use the QR code or just send us an e-mail we can send you information, hopefully that will be helpful. OK last few bits: interactions. So we’ve now got good stuff happening from the stage if you like. The question is how do we make sure the interactions between people are working too. Things like the Q&A sessions, team meetings, I’m really going to kind of focus on in here. Because especially when it comes to team meetings, this could be a whole team who have a number of people in the team who have different ways that they would like to communicate.

It is a really bad thing for you to not take that into account in your team if that is the case. This becomes very kind of sharp when it comes to members of your staff. So, if you are sort of managing and setting up interaction sessions, it could be a meeting, it could be a breakout session. The three key roles whoever is leading they set the tone. There will be some people in that meeting who hopefully may have told you that they have particular access needs or disabilities. And then there are the others in the session who may not care. And what you’ve got to do is to try and work out how to have a good meeting. So there’s a couple of ways of doing that, first one: reasonable adjustments. We’ve seen it already so for example when I was at the Bib (n.b: BBC). I had people with five different disabilities in my accessibility team, and it was my job to try and make sure that they were all able to feel as part of the team as everybody else. For example I had one person who always needed text to speech service because he was hard of hearing. Or if there was a quick meeting that we need to have he could lip read just as long as the etiquette was set that even in a room with say twenty people in it, whenever somebody was talking, they talked in the direction of the person who is lip reading.
It’s very difficult to lip read if you’re seeing the side of somebody’s head. That’s not so easy, so literally whenever we didn’t have the ability to have text to speech happening in those rooms at that time that was our etiquette. That’s the key thing.

What you want is people to work out how to do this together if you like. And it could be sharing questions in advance, it could be giving people time to answer when you’re going around a table and asking for people’s opinions. But fundamentally as the person leading that stuff you’re trying to manage the discussion. And it’s not easy especially with things like brainstorms. Just an example that white board is your external memory in that room. All of the things that people have said that get onto that whiteboard are there for everybody to see. So they don’t give the same response from the person five before them. If you can’t see the whiteboard, that’s not great. So one of the things that we can intend to do is to actually stop using whiteboards like that. If you’ve got somebody who’s blind in a room, for example, and actually use something like Miro. Present it up onto the screen for everyone else because that is the whiteboard, But for the person who’s blind, they can have that on their laptop, with their screen reader in their ear reading all of that out. Suddenly bringing it into the digital sphere has made that possible.

So this is the sort of thing that you might want to think about. Here’s an autistic person. We run speed dating sessions where we allow organisations to hear from people with disabilities about what they really, really need. This was a wonderful quote from one of our autistic participants. I like it when people adapt to my needs, turning off their videos so I don’t have to look at their eyes on Zoom, unless they’re the person talking, in which case I’ll let their video to be on. Have a fierce and open conversation about what all people’s preferences are, check the value of the video being on, check the risks of being in a meeting with your video off, use subtitles whenever possible, allow people to ask questions in the chat as well as by speaking. Multimedia – that’s the sort of thing that you need to be kind of thinking about. How do you get the best of the people in a room to try and help them all contribute? It’s really, really difficult for teams. It’s even harder when it comes to an event when you’ve asked people to get into chat to the people on their table and then suddenly it’s not quite working quite so well anymore.

We’ve got loads of stuff, this is just one aspect of accessibility in the workplace that we work on. But hopefully that gives you an idea of some of these things that can get interaction working. Final thing: help and support. So you need to train whoever is providing support at your events, whether they are online or physical, in understanding what a person with a disability “looks” like in inverted commas. So here on the screen, I have three people who have visible disabilities. Andrea Bocelli, he’s blind.
Warwick Davis, he’s of restricted growth. Michael J Fox, he has Parkinson’s disease, now, so his hands shake a little. If you were speaking to anyone of those three people for more than about half a minute, you would know exactly that they had a disability. There are four people who also have disabilities that you won’t see, and that’s Jessie J on the left there who has a heart condition, Morgan Freeman, who has a chronic pain condition, and Jennifer Aniston and Keira Knightley who are both dyslexic. You would not know by talking to them. So it’s really important when somebody comes to an event or whatever and says, look, I have this need.

It’s entirely possible for people to look at them and go, but yeah, but you’re not using wheelchair, you’re not disabled. You know, that’s just not right. You need to, if somebody says they have a need you need to meet them where they are. Because we can guarantee that you will have moments that were needed to be handled. So I’m guessing that of the 119 people still in the room, all of you wanted this webinar to be a slightly different, and me to be slightly slower, or the slides to be slightly clearer, to be less on them, whatever they are. You know, we all want as much as we can get in terms of how it works for me. And we all have different expectations and desires of how events go. Here are just some of the things that we’ve experienced a lot of. So someone signs up for your online event and they say can you not use Zoom, can you use Teams? That’s a big decision for any organisation and it may be portrayed as actually I find Teams more accessible than Zoom. You may not necessarily get what you want. You would need to have somebody who can handle that. No-one asked for BSL interpretation when they register for events.

Somebody arrives and they need it on the day, that’s just not going to happen. So you need somebody who’s able to say, look, I’m really sorry, but we needed that information before the event for us to book some interpreters. Again, these are the sorts of things that happen. You book that ramp, you arrive at the venue and it’s not there. Your main presenter cannot get onto the stage. What do you do? In the Q&A, someone calls one of your presenters for ableist language. I’ve had this and it went catastrophically bad for 15 minutes at an event, a conference that I was at in London about 10 years ago. I wasn’t running the event but somebody basically stood up and said to one of the people on the stage “you’re ableist, how dare you”. And the place went into complete kerfuffle for 15 minutes. As the people who are actually doing the event, we’re trying to work out what the hell to do. You know, why haven’t you included anyone with a disability on a panel? The answer could be everybody on the panel had a disability that wasn’t a visible one. So it’s very, very easy to kind of throw rocks on a lot of occasions. Someone says the air conditioning is too loud, someone says the conversation is too fast in breakout sessions. So these are the sorts of things that are likely to crop up. Are your people going to be able to handle them? One summary and we’ll do final questions and then the end.

Here is a slide, you can take a photo of it now. It will be up, as I say on HiHub in a week’s time. But this is, if you want, a “how should we set things up in one slide?” That is your one slide checklist. Pete, questions from today, anything that you wanted to bring to us in the round rather than answering on the chat? Pete: Thank you, I’ve been unmuted, which is great. One interesting question was how much do we need to go about accessibility to get to our event? So we, if somebody’s located in the city, do I need to, how far out do I need to tell you how to get there? My response was certain cities in the world have some great apps that support you on top of say, Google Maps. And therefore consider if you know, you’re doing an international conference, we’ve got people from other places. Hey, this is the one that works for me. I don’t know if you’ve got any other views about what. Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, we’ve tested I think it was over twenty of those sorts of wayfinding type things, both external to buildings and internal to buildings. So lots of really great tech that’s there. My gut feel and is that most people who have a disability know how to get around because they do it all of the time.

Getting to your event is no big deal. Unless there is something about your event that is a big deal. You know, like trying to get in. You need to, everyone else is going through the front way, but you need to go through the back way. Oh, you need an accessible parking space, OK, we need to organise that in a different way or whatever. You know, most people I know who have a disability and need help to be able to get places have that help because that’s their life. I wouldn’t worry too much is what I would say.

Pete: The other one is conflicting needs. You get some people come along and say I want the lighting brighter so I can lip read.
Another person says, I don’t want it too bright because I find it overwhelming. How are you going to, how do you manage that when you’re not going to get them all in the room beforehand to say, hey, I’ve chosen this or I’ve chosen that. Jonathan: Sure. That’s the reason you ask about access needs. It’s the best way of doing things is to say rather than there are so many different types of disabilities in the world, we need to cover them for every event, everything that we’re doing. Try and do an event that is accessible to the people at your event, because then you can say, OK, we have nobody in the room who is sensitive to bright light.

So actually we can make the lights brighter, you know, So where there are balances, use the data that you’ve asked for to give the people who are there the best experience. Don’t waste all of your money on a BSL interpreter If there’s nobody in the room who needs it. The data is so important. Otherwise you will just burn all of your budget on stuff that nobody thanked you for. And let’s not do that. Pete: And another one.

Yac: Jonathan, sorry, I was just going to add to you. Thank you, Pete. I was just going to add to that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong if you’ve got an event for 50 people having two separate events, both of 25. Something I used to do a lot in government is there are, in the nicest possible way, two groups of people who don’t want to talk to each other or have different needs. And we would run session A in the morning, session B in the afternoon. A would be a quiet session, reduced volume, reduced light. B would be a more intensive session with maybe some more flashing light, more interactivity and you don’t give people choice as to which session would be most, let’s say, suitable for them. So don’t feel that one session has to be all things to all people. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with separating sessions into smaller groups of people. That can be really helpful.

Jonathan: Great stuff, Yac. Thanks for that. Totally.

Pete: And we’re hitting the time.

Jonathan: We’re hitting the end of the hour. Can I take the MP? Feel free to share this stuff, but please credit us if you use this and we’ve got upcoming webinars, next month it’s GAAD – yey! I bet loads of people get really enthused by GAAD, but nothing happens after. We’re the after people come and bring us all of your questions about we love that GAAD, I got so inspired. How do I do some that now? That’s next month. In June, Pete is talking about six blockers that undermine your accessibility programme. We’ve got a few gifts.
So again, if you like QR codes and they work for you and there’s one on this slide. So this is HIBot. It’s getting that Q&A with our experience happening after the event.
So it’s a Q&A chat bot that has literally been trained on just the good stuff, just the stuff that we think is reliable. And when it comes to accessibility, if you don’t like the QR code, just pop to our website and find it.

Another QR code. As I say, free audio book. Somebody said, yeah, how do I? Are there any books about this? Yes, there are. This is mine. You can get it for free. And this is the audio book version. If you don’t actually like reading books, and you would prefer to just listen to them, then this is the version that you can do that with. We’ve got it in both. And then that final thing. Which is, I hope you’ve really appreciated this. We give out so much free information every month. We’ve been doing it now for, I think this is month 66, and we started in COVID. So if you think that, that’s rather good. We don’t charge you a single thing for it. This is a conference that happens every month, with no charge. That you can join from wherever you are in the world. If you think that’s a rather cool thing to do, then as I say, please feel free to vote for me in the National Diversity Awards. It’s really important for the national diversity people to understand that disability fits into diversity. And digital really matters as well as all of the events that you’re doing. Pete, any last words?

Pete: Do come back next month. Do share with your friends to come along too, or colleagues. We love having you at this. We love listening to your questions. It really is a good connection. And I hope you find these sessions, and connecting with other people in the community, useful. So have a good month, and we’ll see you next month.

Jonathan: See you next month. Thanks everybody. Cheers. Take care. Bye bye.