Ever organised an event and just assumed “accessible” meant a ramp at the front door? This week on WB40, Michelle O’Connor — co-founder of the Access Given conference — explains why that’s nowhere near enough, and what actually changes when you design an event around access needs from the start rather than bolting them on afterwards. Lighting, seating width, catering layout, sensory rooms, joining instructions that don’t leave people dreading the unknown — the detail is granular, and most of it costs nothing to fix once someone tells you it’s a problem.
With neurodivergence estimated at over half the tech workforce and disclosure rates nowhere close, this is a conversation about who gets left out of rooms, meetings, and conferences without anyone quite noticing. Well worth a listen if you’ve ever run an event, chaired a meeting, or designed a process for “everyone.”
Find out more about Access Given on their website, their LinkedIn page, and their YouTube channel.
Full Transcript of the show, automatically generated by Descript:
Lisa: Welcome to episode 350 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Matt Ballantine, and Michelle O’Connor.
Matt: 350 feels like it should be like significant, but as far as I can work out, it’s only significant in the way. It’s half a 700, but it’s still quite a, a landmark number. So welcome to the 350th episode of WB 40. It’s a lot better than it used to be, although slightly less frequent and certainly much less predictable, which I think is a good thing.
We haven’t had a show for over a month because we had actually a number lined up, but because of various things, including a detached retina and , like ridiculous heats like it’s the planet Mercury in London and other things. We haven’t been able to do any shows for about a month. But we’re back.
And then we’re gonna take a long break for the summer ’cause that’s how we roll on WB 40. Lisa, pleasure to be with you again. How has your week been?
Lisa: Nice to see you. It feels like it’s been a long time. And I was trying to think, you know, the, I always find with these things it’s like, what did I do last week?
I’m not like you where I write a week note that says all of the things that I’ve done this week and, and publish it to people. And whilst I might work out loud on a project and do that internally, it’s not something I ever got into the habit of actually posting out to the internet. But, so over the last week or so, I, I did a talk at a local school talking to some small groups of year tens about my wibbly wobbly career, which was fun.
Actually ended up being, I think there were four of us in the room who all did different aspects of communications. And it was quite interesting talking to the teacher that had brought us in. ’cause one of the people was like, shouldn’t we all be a bit more different? It’s like, but yeah, the thing is, it’s nice to have jobs that people won’t have heard of.
And actually, given the nature of the background of where you got there, people were, they’re really achievable. And it’s like, oh, I love that. And then I thought to myself, maybe I should have done something that needed six years and a, a a a year in, uh, doing some kind of practical work. But, you know,
Matt: can I say, Lisa, can I say this with all, you know, the with love and intent, but the idea of you concentrating on something for six years plus a year?
Sorry.
Lisa: Well, you say that, you know, it’s, it’s nearly nine years since I’ve been freelance, which is the longest I’ve done anything. I know,
Matt: but that’s not like doing the same thing every day, is it?
Lisa: It’s not. I do like the fact that it is doing different things and I don’t wanna jinx it. But one of the other things I’ve done this week actually on that matter is had a conversation with an organisation about doing an interim role and actually sort of going back in house, but on an interim basis, which would be a bit different.
Matt: Interesting.
Lisa: It sounds like it might be quite a challenging environment and yet it’s also sounds like a really interesting opportunity. So I’ve got another chat about that tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to finding out a bit more. I’ve also been, we’re back on the SharePoint bandwagon, not bandwagon, but we’re back doing SharePoint work.
Matt: How,
Lisa: just when I think of Escape, SharePoint comes back and I mean, I’m, I’m grateful for the work in some ways and in other ways it feels like a never ending treadmill of share pointing. So that’s fun. And yeah, that’s, I feel like there was something else. Oh, yes. I went to a really interesting session on accessibility, but specifically around epilepsy, uh, at the HSBC building in Canary Wharf last Monday.
And there’s a lovely bit of research looking at how organisations can be more epilepsy friendly in their communications and in how their offices are set up. And it was a really interesting panel discussion and there was a lovely case study of somebody who, found out that she had epilepsy as a teenager and she was actually there on stage being an advocate, and she’s still only 19 or 20.
And she was remarkably articulate and it was a really interesting conversation. And I think it’s something that I didn’t know. I, I don’t know all the, I didn’t know as much of the detail about it, but there was lot, there’s lots more to unpack and I need to do a bit more reading of that report. But yeah.
How about you, Matt? What have you been up to?
Matt: Well, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the show, so I have published a book since I was last on, so I’ve kind of got this split identity at the moment, which by day I continued to do my work as an engagement manager. Managing engagements. We’ve got some interesting things going on.
Obviously today as we’re recording this on the 20th of July, if you have, uh, teams who are working in the public sector, there’s a certain sense of all bets are off. Who’s gonna be the new boss as they, uh, announce new members of the cabinet, like it’s some sort of football squad. So that’s, that’s interesting.
We had a big away event, uh, last week where, uh, some of us went up to a hotel just outside Wakefield with a, a building with a moat that was quite entertaining. And uh, so that’s the sort of day job stuff continues chugging away. And then conversations about keynote speeches and how we’re going to try to be able to get copies of the book into people with influences hands, which is an experiment that Nick and I are, are running at the moment.
And then there’s occasionally these two worlds crossover. So I’ve got one public sector client who have asked if I can run a, an event around randomness and serendipity and luck and what that means for thinking about ai for about a hundred of their digital leaders in September, which would be quite good fun, I think.
So I’ve been embarking on that as well, uh, alongside all of that. Uh, school finished on Friday, so I’ve got two teenagers now loafing around the house rather than just one, ’cause the other one finished GCSEs and June has been doing absolutely nothing since. But from lounging around, it’s mostly jealousy.
And uh, at the weekend we went up to Herefordshire and I think it’s Staffordshire, but uh, to Ludlow. And we went to, it’s the second year we’ve done it. They have a concert in the, in the Keep of Ludlow Castle. And so we got to see, uh, Blancmange who were really, they only had one song, let’s be frank.
You had, uh, mark Mond, uh, what a diva, amazing performance. And then the headline out with the Human League. And, um, whilst Phil Oakey does look a little bit like that bad character from that film with Ben Stiller about the models, I can’t even remember the film’s name. Um, Zoolander. Zoolander, that’s it.
So that you know the bad character in Zoolander. He, he’s got this strange goatee beard thing that makes him look a little bit like a, and, and he’s, he’s, he’s got an eccentric dress sense as Mr. Oakey Oakley. But it was very good. So that was good. It’s also not often these days I get to go to a gig where I feel like I’ve lowered the average age of the room.
So, uh, that’s good fun. So yeah, all that sort of stuff. And then this is the last week and then we’re off on holiday for a couple of weeks. So a chance to be able to kick back, relax. That’s the other thing I’ve been doing. Oh yes. The other thing I wrote about it actually on the line this morning, which is I’ve got back into using a fountain pen and a notebook, which has been very enjoyable because it’s helping me to realise how much I’ve missed by not taking notes because of the way in which it helps me think about things and remember things.
But then being able to scan pages from the notebook straight into LLM of your choice for it to be able to make notes on your notes, which is really interesting. And that’s kind of thinking about how you can use some of this technology in ways that you couldn’t do before. Which I don’t think there’s enough of, at the moment, I think we’re spending too much time focusing on how we might use these things to efficiency drive stuff rather than do new and novel activities.
So, so yes, that’s been my week or so.
Lisa: How about you, Michelle? What have you been up to recently?
Michelle: Most recently I was in Rome which was hotter than hell. And it was
Matt: ironic
Michelle: with the bat in there, it was 40 degrees. But you
Matt: know,
Michelle: I know I couldn’t go over that side though. I have tattoos. They don’t like that. It was 40 degrees, uh, two of the days that we were there.
And for context, I am a golf and my partner’s a ginger. So like that weather not conducive to our beings. But it was really good to get away. It, I was thinking as you were talking about like the way in which people use technology to kind of think about things differently and, and, and engage with the world differently.
We went to a coffee shop, uh, and it was a very hipster coffee shop. ’cause I was in desperate need of a flat white that wasn’t just a shot of espresso, that was ili. So there was two women who didn’t speak Italian or English and they had a translate app on their phone. So they asked the waitress a question on the phone and then showed her the screen where it translated it and then asked her to respond and did it that way.
And I thought that was a really interesting use of an AI that’s been around for a long, long time. And I was thinking about how much the world must open up to people by using these kind of tools, because then I took a photo, I took a photo of a photo in one of the galleries that we were in to try and escape the, the heat.
And I noticed that when I took the photo on my phone, that there was detail that I couldn’t see in the picture in the room. I think it was a combination of my height in comparison to where the painting was on the wall along with a glare. And then I noticed as soon when I looked at it on my phone that I had missed out on so much detail about just that.
And, and I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t had taken a picture, but I just took a picture of it. ’cause I was like, oh, that’s a, that’s a cool thing. Um, what else have I been doing
Matt: that that particularly is a, is a, you, you get another example of that, which is middle aged people who are too vain to get reading glasses yet.
And they use their phone to zoom in on menus in dark restaurants because they can’t read a thing. It’s the same principle.
Michelle: Yeah. Or the iPad photo. That’s, that’s a favourite. ’cause they can see it bigger. Um, yeah. I what else have we been doing? We’ve been chipping away at a couple of things for access given in the background.
So we’ve got
Lisa: what’s access given Michelle.
Michelle: Oh, funny you should ask. Access Given is a one day accessible digital accessibility conference. Uh, it takes place in Newcastle ine once a year at the moment. Our last event was in May. Yes. Uh, and that’s where I met Lisa for the first time. Uh, and that was great ’cause Lisa spoke at it with Matisse.
Um, so in an attempt to try and keep that moving and ticking on, we are currently, I like to say sch, but realistically it’s just planning, long term strategizing, if we wanna use that term. Things to do throughout the year before the next event, which will be in April, 2027. So we’ve got, I think while I was away I saw Ellen, my co-founder, uh, was chipping away at emails, planning things.
So we’ve got something that we’ll have lined up in September and another thing in November. But I dunno the details yet because I wasn’t in those calls because I was in Rome burning. But those were the things that I was doing recently ish. I dunno what I’ve got coming up next.
Lisa: We can get to that later.
It’s all good.
Michelle: Yeah.
Lisa: Shall we get on with it then?
Matt: I think so.
Lisa: So, Michelle, you mentioned the, uh, so talking about access given, and it’s an accessible conference about accessibility, which sounds like, it sounds a bit total logical, but I think my experience of it having first come last year as an attendee, it blew me away. All the kind of care and attention that you and Ellen put in to actually creating a really accessible and inclusive day, as well as the subject matter being about accessibility.
Could you explain a little bit more about how it came about and the sort of thought processes and what you’ve learned in terms of actually putting on accessible events for people? It’s quite a broad question, but I just find it fascinating because having gone to a lot of events over the last few months, I’ve noticed some people doing some things really well.
I’ve seen other things where the setup just doesn’t seem to be conducive to anyone actually learning or hearing anything. Tell us, tell us more about the day. How did you, how did it come about and what do you do to make it accessible in itself?
Michelle: Yeah. I think initially it came about because Ellen and I had attended a conference that claimed to be fully accessible and inclusive.
And when we went, we found that to be absolutely not the case. The venue was wheelchair accessible. Great. I’ll just continue. Um, the venue was wheelchair accessible. But that isn’t where accessibility starts and ends as far as we’re concerned. That’s kind of a basic thing, and that is often just a venue having a service.
Right. So Ellen and I thought, okay, in the Northeast there’s a huge gap in people’s ability to access digital products and services through lack of knowledge or lack of infrastructure. What, but we also wanted to create a place for those people to feel welcomed and included. So we set out to create an event that was accessible from the ground up where accessibility was a given and it didn’t have to be granted or accommodated, hence the name access given.
So the first thing we did, obviously, was to seek a venue that was accessible. So we found the catalyst, which was built I think in collaboration with the National Institute for Ageing. So a lot of the features of that building are accessible for people with I think particularly dementia. So there’s a lot of soft furnishings.
The, the whole space is obviously wheelchair accessible as well. And then we went into the main theatre room and we found that that was actually ideal because not only was it a fully accessible space, but the aisles for attendees, the seats were double wide. So people could go and sit down and if somebody wanted to get up, they weren’t tripping over feet, they could just casually walk across.
There were fans under every seat, which is really helpful if it’s hot or if somebody’s just feeling hot. And then each seat also had a charger built in and we could control the lighting in that room, which was really important to us as well. So that was kind of the first step. And then we thought, okay, well what else?
That’s fine. These are inbuilt into the venue. What can we offer? What can we do that goes above this? Last year, we kept it really simple. We had four speakers. That was it. So there were no overlapping talks at all. And there were four one hour-ish kind of slots. And then we had longer breaks. Um, we also had captions inbuilt live captioning for every talk.
And that was kind of the first step that we did. And then another thing that we really, really, really wanted was to have a sensory room. Predominantly these events are extremely overwhelming. They’re incredibly, they can be incredibly challenging for anyone with sensory processing difficulties or disorders.
So, uh, we were building it kind of from a neurodivergent perspective. Ellen and I are both neurodivergent, so we kind of thought, what do we need if we’re going to an event that’s a full day? Uh, and it was somewhere to decompress on a shorter day and no kind of decision paralysis to get in the way. So that’s why we didn’t have any overlapping speakers.
That was our first year. It was great. It went well. We had a couple of teething problems as you do. ’cause we’re not event organisers, right? It’s just the two of us kind of trundling along, hoping for the best. The event this year that Lisa spoke at was bigger, but it was scaled up in a sustainable way because ultimately it’s still Ellen and I, but we roped in the help of some of our friends to act as Wayfinders throughout the day.
And we acted on the feedback that we had gotten from the previous year. So we implemented a couple of changes. One of the things that we did was that we shortened the main talks, um, and kept them more succinct. We also then added lightning talks and a panel so that people could kind of, if they were, if they, if their attention span, for example, is literally 10 minutes, they can learn something in a lightning talk, take that away and move on.
Um, and another main piece of feedback we got from last year was the layout of where we had the lunch offering and what was available. So in our first year we had catering similar to this year, but it was kind of laid out in quite a narrow space. So we had a couple of wheelchair users who found it quite difficult to navigate in and outta that space when it was busy.
So this year we asked for that to be completely moved. And then another thing that we were asked is that quite a lot of our attendees are neurodivergent as well, and they struggled with having a packed lunch provided in a bag because they couldn’t see what was in there and they might have, you know, food issues.
They don’t, you know, particular tastes or textures, things like that, that go beyond dietary or allergy requirements. So this year we made sure that we had a larger space that people could navigate around in wheelchairs and that the food was on show still obviously packaged and, and, and, and safe, but people knew what they were getting rather than just taking a guess on a bag and then feeling awkward or uncomfortable to say, actually I can’t eat that because it will send me into a tizzy, which happens to me sometimes if it’s unexpected.
Um, so those types of things that we did, again, we had no overlapping speakers. A sensory room again. And then we also, one of the bug bears that we both have as freelancers is when you attend a conference that you’ve spent money on, sometimes hundreds of pounds, you’ve lost a day of billable work because you’re at this event, you might have travel costs as well, and you go and the person or people speaking at that conference are just in love with the sound of their own voice.
And they’re kind of just telling stories because they like to say that they’re cool and here’s what they’ve done. Obviously, as a copywriter and content designer, stories are really important, right? They’re, they’re what bring people together. And sometimes there is a place for that. But if you are a freelancer and you’re spending time and money and losing out on billable money, we wanted each and every one of our talks to give someone something tangible to take away that they could then apply to their own work.
Um, so we wanted to make sure that people who did come would learn from it and have something to like to take away from that, which I think also leads to it being more accessible because you’re learning something that you can take away. You’re getting something back. And then obviously while it is an in-person event, every talk has been recorded.
So we put them up online so that people who couldn’t attend for whatever reason, can still access those talks and learn. Because you can’t have you can’t have an accessible event that is, that’s bound to just in person really. I think if you want to share knowledge, it has to be free available. So those are, those are the things that we’ve done.
Um, we don’t do everything perfectly. We know that, oh, actually this is one thing that we get a lot of compliments on and it’s probably, I always forget about it. We had quite an in-depth accessibility guide that we created. So this is not just toilets are here, you’ll find lunch here. Here’s the ramp, here’s the hearing loops blah, blah, blah.
This was, uh, a step-by-step guide basically of what to expect on the day when you arrive at the venue. There were photos of us, there were photos of our speakers. Um, it went into a social story to say, when you arrive to the building, you’ll go in this entrance or this entrance, you will be asked for your name.
After that, you’ll write your name on a sticker or collect your lanyard. And then from there you’ll be given blah, blah, blah. Because we also found that attending these things. It’s quite scary, right? Because you, some people feel like they might not belong there or maybe they’re going on their own, they don’t know anyone.
It’s really intimidating to walk into a space, particularly a space, the size of the catalyst itself and think, oh no, like what do I do now? Do I need to find the QR code for the ticket that I bought? Like blah, blah, blah. So we wanted to create, we wanted to remove as many barriers as possible, and that’s where we came up with the idea of having the accessibility guide, which we sent out via email in advance with a link to it on our website.
And then we also had the physical guide itself printed for the day and on the back, lots and lots of space for notes because people like to take notes, as you mentioned earlier. Um, it helps them process information and sometimes it’s nice to just kind of mindlessly doodle as well. Um, so those are the things that we’ve done to make it an accessible conference for digital accessibility, all of the accessibility.
Matt: Do you, as you’ve been through all of that, do you sometimes wonder if. Trying to think of a way to put this, it would be, it’d been easier to start from scratch rather than trying to retrofit the traditional conference or event format.
Michelle: I think in some ways we kind of started from scratch because every conference I’ve ever, I’ve ever been to has been massive. Like a lot of co a lot of events, the size that we have wouldn’t necessarily call themselves a conference, particularly last year when we had four speakers and a day that started at 10 and finished at four and that was it.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a conference. That’s more of an away day type situation. Um, and that’s something, you know, it was basically for kind of one hour lunch and learns and it was great. But I think the other thing is we do know who we want to attend. So positioning it as, as a conference, but keeping it small-ish, I think was the best way to bridge that gap.
Initially we thought it would be a lot of freelancers coming, freelancers, contractors, people who were just kind of figuring out they wanted a day out. Our price point was a lot cheaper than other conferences and events of a similar kind of style. And that just wasn’t the case actually. We got mostly third sector people, massive groups of third sector attendees in both years.
So then we thought, okay, well actually positioning it as a conference is the way to go. Um, and we hope that then from that people will share the word, spread the word attend next year, and als ultimately take those learnings and apply it to their work in their organisations.
Lisa: And I think what I think is fascinating and being able to reflect.
So as you might know, wedge and I, so Wedge came along. We used to do a conference in London called Intranet. Now for intranet people, it was a similar size in terms of attendee numbers. But when I think about the last agenda we did, everything was lightning talks except for two 15 minute keynotes, maybe three keynotes.
So there was one, one first thing, one before lunch, and then maybe one after. But we had something like 20 speakers throughout the day and I dunno how I could cope with that. Now it’s a lot of people, firstly it’s a lot of organisation to get that many people lined up. And I do know that we had feedback on the, maybe the last one that we did that, you know, there wasn’t enough space to breathe everything.
There were nine minute talks. ’cause I think they previously tried, five minutes was too short, seven minutes is nearly there, but nine minutes is like a sweet spot. But if you’ve got sort of four, nine minute talks in a row, then that’s quite a lot to take on board and you need a bit of space to process.
And we did have breaks, but I think if I was like, I’m absolutely in awe of you both for putting this on and con, because I love going to events. I talk about it all the time. I find all of the logistics and the stress around running events. I had a, my Fitbit once told me, if you have more days like this, Lisa, you’ll die.
Like I, I carry quite a high level of stress when it comes to events if I’m in charge of it. So I’m so grateful and I, and it’s so interesting hearing you talk about all of this and the kind of thought processes behind it because some of it’s stuff I just genuinely didn’t know about before. And I think what I think is interesting as well, so when we were researching for the book and talking about it since that neurodiversity thing, really important for people in business and technology, there was a statistic that I read recently, which is something like 53% of people who work in technology either identify as or have been diagnosed as neurodivergent.
That’s like over half. And that’s the people that have acknowledged it. Like I talk to so many of my friends, I’m like, are you sure you are not? You know, we travel in Pax but I think compared to the number of people who are actually disclosed at, who have disclosed that to their employer, it’s something like 3%.
Like there’s a massive disparity between the two numbers. But I think, you know, maybe not everybody needs this, but making accessible spaces makes it, it does make it easier for everyone to process and to actually learn from what’s going on. And when I think about how that might apply, so I’ve been doing some training recently and thinking about how to deliver training in a way that works for neurodivergent folks.
And thinking about the, the feedback that people had ’cause they’re for another client, well, in fact, you know, how do you feel when you get invited to a daylong away day and there’s no agenda, like, or this is the objective, but you’ll find out when you get there. You know, being able to share that accessibility guide, what to expect beforehand.
I think sometimes facilitators are afraid to say that in too much detail because people, if people know what it is, they’re gonna say, well I’m definitely not going, I’m not interested. Whereas actually not giving that information upfront means that it’s putting the onus on individuals to dread it ’cause they don’t know.
And the unknown is often worse than actually knowing what’s happening. And I think, yeah, so it just made me think about how, how good are we at doing, joining instructions for meetings and training sessions and actually workshops and helping people come. And is that something that you found in your work?
Is there, are there things that you think that, how this translates into the sort of like day to day business?
Michelle: So, I mean, access given is also like a passion project of us. So like we both have day jobs and I am a contracting content designer for the regulated industries. So a lot of the organisations that I work for don’t apply any of these things to anything that they do.
Like I will be sent a, a meeting. There was one, there was one organisation I worked in, I can’t name names obviously. But they would send these like mass emails saying mandatory attendance has to be, you know, every day, every week an hour at like a 4:00 PM on a Thursday or a Friday, right? Which is like the worst time nobody’s gonna attend.
Like nobody’s brain is in a position no matter what they have going on to think and focus at that time later on in the week. And I remember thinking how mandatory is it if there’s 150 people on that call that I’ve never worked with and that aren’t in my team and I am supposed, and I met, have to go because I may or may not be asked in the final five minutes of that meeting what I was up to the previous week.
And that used to always fill me with quite a lot of anxiety, right? So I, I thrive in chaotic environments, right? It’s, it’s my, it’s my vibe. I don’t mind a bit of chaos, but I hate waiting. So you can guess what flavour neurodivergent I am. So I would, it would come to like the time of the meeting and I would sign in and I would sit there and I’d have my camera off, my microphone off because I would, I was really, really, really struggling to concentrate and waiting for my name and I was looking at my Garmin.
’cause I also like a bit of data and I was looking at my Garmin and my stress level would be extremely high during that time because I wasn’t sure if I was going to be asked to speak or not. And if I was going to be asked to speak, I would have to then remember what I had done and look back at notes that I had taken because they also wouldn’t ask for your agenda.
Like they wouldn’t ask for anything written in advance. And anything that was spoken was just kind of sent out as a copilot note afterwards. So that, which never picked up my accent properly. ’cause I’m a Dublin nerd, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And I think simply saying, sending an email to say, this week we are going to ask this person from this team, this person, from this team and this person, from this team, what they’ve been up to, um.
In advance if you haven’t progressed anything. Uh, and we can’t help, don’t bother attending ’cause your status will remain as is, right? Because everything was logged, obviously. And I just think those simple things can really, really matter. And while I thrive in a chaotic environment. That isn’t chaos even.
It’s just this weird kind of liminal space that is neither focus or not. It’s kind of like nobody knew what was happening at any time. And it’s a small, like, you know, you, yourself and Matisse were talking about like how people work, right? What’s the best way to meet people, to reach people? How do you get them to engage?
Not that way, you know, that is not a way to engage people. Um, and that’s probably a whole other conversation, but that is one thing that is definitely not neurodivergent friendly.
Matt: There. There’s something though I think about intentionality on this and something I’ve done a fair bit in the last few years is design structures where it isn’t known what will be talked about.
And that’s a very deliberate thing to enable the conversations to happen rather than people falling into habits of what they say is what they always say. And there’s a risk with, you know, form formulating meetings, particularly when nobody’s engaged because everybody knows what’s gonna happen. And so you just get the same ritual, almost word for word repeating week after week after week.
But when I’m doing that, I’m doing it very intentionally. I’m doing it with a lot of structure around it. And I could understand that for some people that might be unsettling. But I also know from when I started in my mid thirties, I spent a couple of years doing management training and a dear friend of mine she she looked to me in horror when I told her what the job was about to do.
And she then explained that when she goes to training events, she just sits in terror waiting to be picked out to be asked to contribute. And she cannot stand that. And I learned from that, that I ne whenever I’m facilitating, I’ll never just pick on somebody. If I need to be able to get some in input from somebody because I need their input, then I, I will help them be able to, um, uh, to contribute.
But I’m not just gonna pick people at random ’cause they’re looking a bit quiet. ’cause people have different styles and people, whether it’s neuro divergence or just learning style or whatever else. But there’s this, this balance between everything being to too planned and then intentional ambiguity and intentional chaos.
And then what I think mostly happens, which is nobody’s got any time to plan for anything properly. And actually what’s going on in a lot of these cases isn’t, it’s an intentional thing that’s been, it’s just nobody’s got any time to do anything properly these days. ’cause they’re also maxed out in meetings where nobody’s had any time to do anything properly to prepare for that one either.
And it’s then just this law of diminishing returns as you go through. And that’s slightly different from events as opposed to the kind of the rituals that we have in organisations. Going back to the events side, do you think that there’s something systemic within the industry? So how, how much was it a challenge of being able to, to change how it was that things like your venue do things or the facilities that your venue has versus what was in your control as a, as a, as an organiser.
Michelle: That’s where your research comes in. Incredibly important. I think. So. I live in Edinburgh, Lin lives in Newcastle. First of all, we knew that we couldn’t have an event, inaccessible event in Edinburgh. Uh, a lot of the buildings are inaccessible. It’s a really old, hilly cobbled issue. Not great for people with mobility issues.
It’s also cost prohibitive for a lot of people. Like the cost of a hotel in Edinburgh midweek off season. Even at that, you’re talking 150, 200 plus pounds. It’s pretty on par with a hotel in London. Right? That’s something that we didn’t want. We, Ellen had been to the, to events in the Catalyst before, so she said, look, I think this is a great idea.
It’s close to the central stations, about 10 minute walk ish uphill though, which is kind of annoying, but at least it’s downhill on the way back. And she said, look, I’ve been there. I find I found it really welcoming. The staff were great. I think they’ll be really you know, on boards with this.
And I said, cool, let’s go for it. We visited them a good few times before our first event to kind of talk about what we needed. People had started to buy tickets by that point, and we had asked them to say if there was anything in particular that they would need. Most of it was kind of stuff that we thought would, you know, should be there anyway.
So it’s like seating, captions, all that kind of stuff. The only, so like when we had our event this year, as I said, we changed where we had the catering and how that was done. That was really, really easy to do. Like, a lot of the things that really make a difference to people are small, right? Like we, we knew that we couldn’t have the catering in that place, right?
So we said to the venue, we can’t have it there. We needed to, we needed to go somewhere else. They were like, absolutely a hundred percent understand that feedback. We kind of thought that at the time, but there wasn’t enough time to move it, you know, ’cause it had all been set up, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay.
This year we had it in a totally, like, we had rented another space in that venue this year as well. So we did have more space, but then we were like, okay, we also want tables and chairs for people to sit at, but not be, you know, in the middle of the communal area, all this kind of thing. They said, grand, absolutely.
I said, can we change the lighting? Can we put the noise levels down? Can we have, you know, the sensory room upstairs, tucked away, slows, blah, blah, blah. Everything that we requested, that was in our control. Was easily done. But I think a lot of people might be afraid to ask a venue or might not know that they can ask a venue to do things.
And at the end of the day, a venue is a space, right? It’s a physical space. It has its own facilities, it has toilets, it has steps, it has ramps, it has lifts, whatever. Those are the things that you need to research first of all, right? So is there a ramp? Is it permanent? Does it need to be? Is it temporary and needs to be taken out?
What are, what’s the toilet situation? Is there hygiene room? Is there, you know, what’s going on there? Are there gender neutral toilets, blah, blah, blah. All these types of things. Those are the things that you can con that you can’t change fundamentally within a building. Like they exist or they don’t, but you have to research it and you have to visit a venue, because I know I’m in the midst of planning a wedding as well, and I know from visiting venues, right?
If they know that, if they think that they’re gonna get a couple hundred quid or a couple of thousand pounds off you, they’re gonna say that they can do everything and anything, right? Because they want to do it. So you kind of have to be a little bit like, okay, well I’m just gonna go to an event or like, not mention that you’re interested, but just be kind of slightly curious about it.
And then you’ll see what the venue is actually capable of. The staff and the catalyst have been amazing to us every single time. Any issue that we’ve had sorted immediately. Anything that we’ve asked, they’ve helped with, they’ve put us in touch with, uh, suppliers, all these types of things, and they’re learning from it as well, because they said ever since that we mentioned that the catering in the main lobby was inaccessible to people in wheelchairs or wheelchair users.
They haven’t put it there since. They know that that’s not a good place to have it. So they’ve looked at other places to do it. They’ve also since asked the caterer to maybe think about not delivering everything in a brown paper bag so that people can see what’s in it if they’re, you know, so it’s these types of things that it’s, we feel that you can’t have an accessible event without sharing the knowledge with the people who run the spaces, right?
So we would, we shared all our feedback. Anything that we, that we even heard anecdotally, they were listening to conversations that were happening, all these types of things. And we were saying, look, the lighting, the sound, all these things, these are small things that matter that we can control to a certain extent and other things we can’t.
And that’s where. You have control, you share your feedback, you make the small changes you, and more importantly, you ask people for their feedback on what they need from your event. ’cause we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t have made change the changes that we made if we hadn’t asked.
Lisa: Yeah, I think that’s really important is getting that feedback, acting on it, finding the right people that are open to it, and obviously finding the right venue.
And I mean, I think about some of the venues I’ve been to recently, and they should be doing this better. Like the people organising the event should have spotted stuff there. There’s so many people involved. But like, so when I went to, um, a conference in Canada recently, so all of the IABC world conferences are massive.
There’s like a thousand-ish people that go to them. They’re enormous. They’re the biggest events I’ve been to and they’re at these massive hotels that can, can actually accommodate that. But the AV setup was absolute dog shit in some of the rooms, like they’ve got this big meeting room and so there’s meet, there’s rooms inside the building that don’t have windows.
So the lighting in the, at least the screen, you can see it. There’s these rooms that were on the side and for some unknown reason, they thought it was a good idea to put the big screens in the window and have the speaker standing in the dark corner. So there was direct sunlight on the screen. And the screen itself wasn’t brilliant as well.
You know, there’s so many good screens you can get now. And just the, the layout in the room was backwards. Like you couldn’t see the screen. Like, I’m still ama I’m constantly amazed. And this is something that I always worked with clients for a lot and talk to anybody about that will listen, make your presentations easier to read, stop cramming them with lots of writing.
I went to another event recently where the speakers had a little monitor that to read their screens like, and they’re like, I can’t read that. It’s like, well maybe there’s a bit too much information ’cause you wrote these slides and if you can’t read it to be able to read it out to the audience, I don’t know what you are thinking
Matt: about it.
This used to be bad, but I think that the move to teams and Zoom and meet has made this worse because we are really used now to presenting where everybody can see the screen right in front of them. And then you go to events and you realise that people have completely lost, you know, the, the, what was it, the t-shirt rule, if, if you couldn’t read it on a t-shirt, you won’t be able to read it on a screen and that kind of thing.
You just see it, it’s so much worse again after it started to get a bit better.
Lisa: Yeah, and I think being really clear to speakers what the shape of the room is gonna be. Like. I was doing, I did some work for a client recently where I basically, I think I fixed a thousand PowerPoint slides. I didn’t realise PowerPoint was gonna be my life this year as well.
But you know, these are, these are gonna be delivered in rooms of really modern buildings, but they’re quite long and they don’t have the side monitors halfway down, so the people at the back just aren’t gonna be able to see it. And I think, you know, partly there’s an issue though with the layouts of the rooms that people are choosing.
But I think if you’re really clear with your speakers up front and maybe show a photo of what the room looks like so that they can actually picture like, what does it look like from the back of the room? It can help people. Like I, when I did a talk last year in London, I’m still, I still think it was one of the best presentations I’d ever done because I just come off the back of Marcus’s Speaky Summit and I, they didn’t really get any good professional pictures of me.
And I was the last, ’cause I was the last speaker of the day, but one of my friends who was in the back row at the event took photos and I could read my slides from her photos from the back of a dark room. So I was like, okay, that’s good. I manage that. At least I’m, at least I’m practising what I preach.
Matt: I do wonder though, if you think about how most events are exclusive, not in a good way, therefore, you probably don’t find the, uh, today’s events.
There are many cases of any sort of volume of people who have issues around accessibility and therefore they aren’t getting the feedback. So therefore, nobody ever. Does anything about it, and it’s not until you test. I, I dunno, is that where, where this is problematic within the industry at the moment, that just because it’s, it’s reinforcing itself at the moment for the fact that, I mean if you look at London venues, anything that’s cheap is gonna be a knack atole theatre, which is inaccessible from the start.
Lisa: Listeners, Michelle and I were just shaking our heads furiously while Matt was saying that.
Matt: Explain why.
Lisa: No, I, sorry to jump in. I know this is really a Michelle question, but So you are right Matt. A lot of the time people don’t necessarily know better and they don’t give the venues feedback. And I know over the last few years in particular, it’s been really hard to run physical events.
You know, they dropped off the cliff in 2020. We’re starting to see people coming back to it, but we’re not talking about edge cases here. The problem is a lot of people have been excluded from going to these events because historically they’ve been so inaccessible. So you are right.
Matt: Well that, that was my point, that because it’s been inaccessible, therefore there there’s no feedback because people are being locked out because they can’t get to these events because they’re rerun in inaccessible way.
Lisa: Okay,
Michelle: but okay, I get that. But I think there’s a co there’s a couple of things that you can do to mitigate that. So one of the things is highlight how it’s accessible. So that was the first thing we did. We mentioned how it’s accessible. We had captions, sensory room, no breaks, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?
The venue itself is accessible. Another thing that you could do is speak to people that you know who would want to go or have gone to events who may have access needs and ask them, oh, I saw that you went to this event. How was that? One thing as well that we got feedback on this year is that we had our keynote speaker carry on lightly is a wheelchair user.
When people, when other wheelchair users saw that we had a speaker who was a wheelchair user. We saw a massive uptick in wheelchair users attending this year. I think like. It’s still, you know, people who are wheelchair users may or may not have other disabilities that might prohibit them from going to a day long event or, or, or going to an event like that.
But we did notice a huge increase. Now, we didn’t, we didn’t choose Carrie Ann as a token wheelchair user as a speaker. We just thought that what she was doing was great, and therefore we wanted her on our stage similar to every speaker that we approached or who applied. We wanted them to share their knowledge and their story with our attendees.
And last year, uh, we had Holly Chuuk and Helen Tson from RNIB, like a power duo. I think. You know, and Holly is a blind content creator, so many people thought about how to make their content content accessible to people with visual impairments. After that, it’s about making sure that you approach the people that you want to talk about a specific topic, include them, and then market them as part of that.
And then if you notice that somebody can’t navigate around a venue or doesn’t know where things are, or isn’t sure about excess needs or doesn’t know if they have, if they can bring a carer or whatever, just say it, be explicit. Say, here’s what the venue offers, here’s what we can try to do. Ask them if there’s anything that outside of that that they might have.
But then it also ties back to something that Carrie Ann said in her talk, which is nothing is ever fully accessible. There’s no such thing as fully accessible, which made Ellen and I shake because we thought that we had said that term and they were like, we never say that. Um, because not only, like somebody’s needs might be different in the morning to in the evening as they’re, as they get tired throughout the day.
Like, I know that I’m bad in the morning, but okay in the evening, so what I might need from an event or a meeting or whatever in the morning is very different to what I’d need in an evening. And I, and you know, so it’s things like that.
Lisa: I think just, um, touching on the volume thing or the numbers thing as well.
Mm-hmm. I know one of the things that we often come up against, you know, it’s seen that this is only a minority problem, this is somebody else’s thing. You know, most of my people don’t have these needs I’d know about, wouldn’t I? But so from a neurodivergence point of view, it’s over half of people in tech.
Michelle: Yeah.
Lisa: Across the UK it’s one in four people have a significant disability. Now, according to the Office of National, the, one of the, the big surveys one in 10 people are dyslexic. One in 12 men and one in 200 women are colorblind. So if you’re relying on colour to tell a story or that’s gonna be a problem for people.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Um, these aren’t, when you add them up, you might find that one person actually is the kind of, like you said, they might have overlapping needs. They might be one person that’s in all of this. But actually there’s also still a lot of stigma around this. So people think, oh, it’s just me. It’s just my personal need, not it’s my right to access this information.
Mm-hmm. Like when I think I, I was talking to somebody recently who was saying, well, I just, I couldn’t really use the software, but I thought it was just me in my eyes and I didn’t wanna raise it because I didn’t wanna be difficult. But they were one of the senior leadership team, and once they’d raised it, suddenly it was a priority to fix it.
It’s a, it’s a complicated thing and it’s easy to laugh it off or say, well, no, that’s not true. But I think there are so many, there’s so many overlapping challenges here. And like when we, even the place we stayed in, in Bulgaria last year, the hotel was an enlisted part of town, should have had to build like an entire extra tower to be able to put in a lift.
Like it just wasn’t, it genuinely wasn’t feasible. Like they weren’t able to build any kind of lift internally in this, in this very small building. But there are venues that are much better than others. And I think there’s also a growing bank of information about the accessibility of venues as well. Is was that app, is it accessibly?
There’s a, there is an app that you can use to see how accessible venues are. Although when I was looking for our book launch, there were very few venues in the area I was looking for. And I dunno how much of that’s just a data collection issue or just how bad East London is. ’cause there’s a lot of, a lot of venues that just have a little step to get into the pub.
Oh, it’s just a little step, but you can’t wheel over a step. Yeah, there’s lots of things that we can, I think there’s this thing about knowing the questions to ask, being open to asking them and doing your research. Like you were saying, Michelle, like, I think that’s really important. And I think a lot of people just haven’t considered it.
It’s not necessarily that they’re scared or they just haven’t thought about it because it’s not something that’s been on their radar.
Michelle: Mm-hmm. And I do think it is slightly compounded by people being able to work remotely. I think remote working is amazing because it makes, you know, careers a lot more accessible to people, but it also means that organisations don’t necessarily have to think about accessibility because the reasonable adjustment is that that person will work from their home where they have their own needs laid out.
So it’s a bit of a, I think as event organisers, it is our duty to do what we can to cater to as many access needs as possible, knowing that there’s no such thing as fully accessible, but trying to mitigate some of the things that we’ve seen. Like it’s just a little step, no, it’s a step. Get a ramp or, you know, find somewhere different or be very explicit about that because if you, the, the venue that we had our after party in had a temporary ramp and we knew that we had wheelchair users attending.
So we were very, very, very. Strong that we needed that ramp there all the time for that event. And we sent somebody ahead to make sure that the ramp was out before everybody else arrived, and that the venue left it out because why would they remove it and then create another obstacle for a wheelchair user to have to find somebody to get the ramp out because they wanted to leave when somebody who didn’t have mobility issues could just leave.
So it it, it’s your duty to do what you can to mitigate these quote unquote small issues. Um, and sometimes it’s as simple as just saying, Hey, can you do this? And more often than not, the answer’s gonna be, oh yeah, we just didn’t think about it.
Matt: Lots of work to be done. And I think, again, with a lot of conversations that we’ve had around accessibility over the last few years on this show, a lot of it is just a lack of awareness. So hopefully by getting this out there and you listening to this, we’ve increased awareness a bit, which is good, and then something needs to be done.
This brings us to the last part of the show, the bit where we ask what’s happening in the week ahead, Michelle, what’s happening in the week ahead?
Michelle: Uh, getting ready for the festival season in Edinburgh, bracing myself.
Matt: How is
Michelle: it to crowds? Well, it’s normally, I love it, right? I think Edinburgh gets really, really, really terrible winters.
It’s, they seem to be like seven months long. So I really like the festival season. I love how vibrant the city is. I love seeing weird and wonderful fringe shows, but navigating the city is difficult. And at the moment, the main street that all the buses and trams go down is completely closed because there was a building fire.
Um, so I’m currently trying to figure out the little sneaky ways that I can get around the city if these things, don’t reopen. Um, and then maybe I will try and write a newsletter for access given on our mailing list that we sometimes forget about because we also don’t want to spam people.
Matt: We’ll put a link on the show notes for where people can go to be not spammed.
Michelle: I can, I can send them to this podcast now. There’s content
Matt: there. Yes. Excellent. Um, as a sort of mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. There we go. Lisa, how about you? What have you got in the next seven days or further?
Lisa: Further? Uh, so I am looking forward to going along to a friend of the podcast, Sharon oday and Digital Jonathan’s book party on Wednesday in Shor Ditch.
Be interesting to see what the venue’s like there. I’ve got a couple of conversations about work related things sort of linked to Edinburgh. I’ve got a work in progress show that I’m going to at my local pub on Thursday. There’s a comedy night that we go to often and this July, every Thursday they’ve had comedians doing practise runs of the Edinburgh shows.
So I’m looking forward to that. And yeah, and I think one of the things over the summer that I’m looking forward to actually might even be, there might be another episode before we get there, but in a couple of months time, I’m gonna be going to the R and IB headquarters. There’s an accessibility in publishing conference happening in September and it’s at the RNIB building, which is also my old office building.
So many, many moons ago before we moved into a shiny, when I was still in house and we moved into a shiny purpose-built office, we were in this old building. But it sounds like what they’ve done is made their entire office space one of the most accessible office spaces, certainly in London, if not in the country.
And I can’t wait to actually see what that feels like in person. So I’m really looking forward to that too. How about you, Matt?
Matt: Well, it’s the last few days before we go off for a bit of a break for the summer. So it’s the kind of tidying of the decks and making sure that I’ve got stuff sorted out for me to go away for two weeks with the sort of basic idea that I’ve got some sort of importance in the world.
And if I’m not there, then it matters, but of course the reality is it won’t matter. So, um, it’s just to make myself feel better really. Uh, and then, uh, we’ll be back in towards the end of the, well no, beginning of the second week in August and then stuff ahead. There’s quite a lot of stuff coming up. I’m not quite sure what stuff will be but um, I’ll be dealing with stuff of varying proportions and various, various topic areas, so that’d be good.
Lisa: Did
Matt: you say
Lisa: where is you’re off to?
Matt: No, I didn’t. We’re going to the Black Forest in South West Germany, so we’re going to drive over a couple of days down there. And then my parents are coming out to meet us from the most bizarre airport in Europe, I believe, because it’s, um, Basel months, no Mulhouse and uh, a Fryberg.
So it’s an airport for three cities, each of which are in different countries. The airport itself sits in France and God knows what that would’ve been like before Sheen, but imagine it’s a little bit easier now, especially if you’ve got an Irish passport like I have. Yay me. So yeah, but it should be good.
Get to see a bit of scenery uh, take in local foods, see some mountains. That’d be lovely. So there we go. So with that, that’s it for WB 40. As I say, it’s been a bit, it’s sort of interrupted over the last few months because it’s become a little bit more sporadic, but I think that actually that leads to a more pleasurable experience for everybody because it means you never quite know if there’s a new show this week.
So there’s that sort of intriguing surprise. We’ve got loads of guests lined up already for starting recording again in September, so there’s plenty of, uh, plenty of WB 40 to come talking to people about, uh, gender and ai. We’re gonna be talking to somebody about I can’t even remember this. There’s at least three or four in the, in the can as it were already.
So we look forward to that. Lisa, as ever, absolutely delights to, to work with you.
Lisa: Likewise.
Matt: And Michelle, thank you again so much for coming onto the show this week. We’ll have all your details on the, well, not all your details, you know, pertinent details resulting in how people can contact you about what you do.
I won’t put your house address or anything like, that’d be weird. Anyway, thanks for joining.
Michelle: Thanks for the chat. It was great.
Matt: And we will be back in September.
Michelle: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet@wbfortypodcast.com and on all good podcasting platforms.
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