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Access advice for arts organisations from Euan’s Guide  

Euan’s Guide is a disabled access review website and app. Reviews are written by disabled people, their families and their friends but venues can list themselves and the amenities that they offer.

If you manage a cultural venue (theatre, cinema, museum, gallery, heritage attraction etc.) you can (and should!) make sure that your venue and its resources are listed on the site. If you are an arts organisation without a dedicated space, you can still encourage those venues you use to make sure they are listed.

There’s a lot that venues can do to make their spaces accessible to disabled people. Check out Euan’s Guide’s excellent blog post Top Tips For Museums and Galleries for ideas about what venues can do – it’s great advice for any arts organisation!

According to Euan’s Guide, many arts and cultural organisations are already doing a good job of making their spaces accessible to a range of audiences. Unfortunately, in many cases, arts organisations are doing a poor job of letting these audiences know about the resources that are in place to serve them. It’s a communication problem rather than an accessibility problem.

A few top tips

Euan’s Guide offers a practical solution to a basic need for reliable information. A Euan’s Guide access survey has found that 95% of visitors had looked for disabled access information prior to visiting a venue and that 87% of respondents had found accessibility information misleading or inaccurate. 73% reported that they had had a trip ruined by inaccurate accessibility information. But as we’ve learned this is a challenge that can be solved and you can be part of the solution.

Main image credit: Euan MacDonald and Paul Ralph visit the National Theatre on Disabled Access Day 2015. Photo courtesy of Euan's Guide.