Image by Kurt Weston via National Quality Centre
If a writer says they’re going to tell you how opera is being received by the opera-going community, and then only interviews Opera Australia, you know you’ll only be hearing about the amazing things that company is doing. If a writer says they’re going to review the local restaurant scene, you’d expect them to have turned up to at least one local restaurant, as well as talked with lots of the locals. So when ArtsHub reviewed art access initiatives for the blind community and then didn’t quote, or even paraphrase, a single blind person, I hope you recognised it for what it was, and was not.
As an art lover and blind person since birth, let me tell you what art access initiatives are really like, in Sydney, the place that likes to think of itself as Australia’s cultural capital.
There’s only one access tour per season. That’s right. It doesn’t matter whether it’s four days of Dido and Aeneas or four months of Chuck Close. And the one thing you can be sure of is that it won’t be on opening night, or the next day. Chances are good it won’t be until the second half of the season. The MCA held the Chuck Close audio described tour three quarters through the season. Every sighted person I knew who wanted to go had already gone, discussed it, and moved on.
So what happens if the special day and time the arts organisation has designated for the access tour arrives, and you need to work late, or there’s a family emergency, or you’re just too tired to go out? Nothing. You miss out. A staff member will say, ‘I’m sorry but there aren’t any more access tours planned’, and your one opportunity to have the same cultural experience as your friends and colleagues had whenever they liked and as many times as they wanted to has gone.
To go to access tours you have to book, and booking is never a straightforward process. I wish I could explain to you why this is so. I’ve tried to find out but so far I’ve failed. It just is. Phone calls are not returned, messages are not passed on, email addresses provided in the access tour information are out-of-date. I’ve been told, “sorry but I didn’t get your message,” by the Art Gallery of NSW, Kaldor Public Art Projects, and Sydney Theatre Company, just to name a few.
Arts organisations seem to expect that, if they just put on an access tour, blind people will be grateful they did, and they will go. I honestly can’t think of an arts organisation in Sydney who hasn’t sent the information about the access tour in PDF (which is often inaccessible to blind people), rather than Word (which usually is accessible), advertised an access tour with less than three days notice, programmed the access tour for an hour or less, arranged the access tour for the middle of a week day, or provided no information about what will be experienced. In other words, they didn’t consult their blind audience. Whenever I ask arts venues about these issues they just say, ‘sorry but marketing didn’t know what to say’, or ‘sorry but there’s nothing else we can do’. Or, the most common response, ‘sorry, but we’ll do it differently next time’. And then they don’t. And then they blame blind people for not being prepared to drop whatever they’re doing at a moment’s notice, to get to the other side of town at 10:00 on a Friday night, for something that they have been told nothing about. And then they feel justified in cancelling access for blind people. Hello Sydney Film Festival.
If you’re one of the few blind people who get into an access tour, there is, in my experience, a 20% chance it’ll be mind-numbingly, soul-destroyingly boring. There’s an audio described tour that will live on in infamy for the victims who attended it, as being less interesting than listening to paint dry. It was delivered by someone who clearly didn’t want to be there, and didn’t want us to be either, it had no thought put into it, and it put one friend of mine off access tours for life. No, I don’t think it’s fair to name the person who delivered it. But if you are an audio describer, and you’re wondering if it’s you, and you’ve never asked for feedback from your audience, it’s time to start.
These are some of the problems with the access tours that happen. It’s important to remember that there are many performances, exhibitions and festivals who provide no access for blind people whatsoever.
There are of course some genuine good news stories. Sydney New Year’s Eve have audio described the fireworks for four years now. I haven’t been to Sculpture by the Sea since they invited me to a gathering where some of the works would be previewed and then, when I asked about a tactile tour, said they wouldn’t do it and wouldn’t have invited me if they’d known I was a blind person. However, the two tactile tours of the exhibitions I had experienced in previous years were a treat, and they increase the availability of them every year.
One thing I know these two organisations have in common is their willingness to listen and respond to feedback from their blind audience members. When blind people told Sydney New Year’s Eve that their audio description needed a lot of work, they took that on and put a lot of effort into continually improving. When blind people said only two tours at designated times during the Sculpture by the Sea season was not enough, they added more, and they added the option to book other times separate to the public access tours.
I don’t know if Sculpture by the Sea have a disability action plan. I do know that Sydney New years Eve have a Disability Action Plan that they work through and update annually, in consultation with the disability sector, and I believe this is one of the reasons they succeed where other arts organisations do not. A disability action plan, when it’s a living document, coordinates access for people with disability throughout the whole organisation. It avoids problems like nobody booking in for the tour because marketing didn’t know where or how to target the information about it, or admin losing booking details because they didn’t know who to pass them on to, or reception turning people away because they didn’t know their organisation ran access tours. Yes, my friends and I have experienced this too.
If you wonder why blind people should have a say in all of this when the rest of the audience do not, it’s because the rest of the audience can go anytime they like, as many times as they like. Blind people can go only once if there’s a designated tour, or sometimes at another specific time booked two weeks in advance. Now, we all know we’re not living in my future dream world yet, where full access is a given and all’s right with the world. Everyone understands that these things take planning, and time, and money. But these decisions about us should not be made without us.
Right now blind people are not treated like an audience to be welcomed, we are treated like a burden to be accommodated.
And if you think I’m angry about this then I’m glad to know I’ve communicated some of the depth of how I feel. I’m angry, frustrated, disappointed bordering on despair enough about this to speak publicly about my experiences as a blind audience member, even though I know I risk losing work. As a disability awareness trainer and consultant specialising in the arts, I know very well how some arts organisations label and treat any person with disability who says anything other than how wonderful things are. But I truly believe that limiting anyone’s access to art, limits their opportunity to grow, and to participate in the cultural life of their local, national and global communities. And I think that while arts organisations calculate their access statistics, and pride themselves on coming under budget yet again, they have forgotten we are real people with real feelings, constantly being deprived of real opportunities.
The Australian arts sector has made some excellent advances in access. And, while I believe that celebrating successes is important, this standing around and congratulating each other on the great start that’s been made has been going on for way too long now. Australia needs to continue progressing with the access to art it provides, before it falls further behind the rest of the world. And make no mistake, Australia is already behind the rest of the world on art access innovation, as demonstrated by the ArtsHub article. Now I know I can add Spain to the growing list of countries I can visit and have an accessible art experience. A blind colleague of mine was recently visiting Sydney for a week and wanted to go to something arty that was accessible. Extensive research on those wonderful websites ArtsHub talked about turned up absolutely nothing.
