Hi Marcus

Sounds as though you had a very interesting yet full day.

Its interesting how a conference on access fails to address or 
consider access issues carefully when designing presentations 
etc. No doubt the organisers will say they cannot cater for every 
disability, but thinking about the considerations for someone with a 
hearing impairmrnt can't be too difficult surely?

Keep up the good work, you're obviously an enthusiastic list 
contributor. I wonder if any other list members would like to 
introduce themselves or to say what their interests are, remember 
to reply to [log in to unmask]

Rita


Last week I went to the ADAPT Trust conference on aesthetics and 
access which coincided with the launch of their new CD-Rom "Open 
Sesame". I thought list members might be interested to find out what 
happened.

The conference organised by ADAPT (Access for Disabled people to Arts 
Premises Today) was at The Lighthouse in Glasgow. The Lighthouse is a 
newly opened exhibition centre - although it is difficult to find 
being tucked away down a narrow street off a pedestrianised shopping 
mall. The building itself is an interesting extension of the Charles 
Rennie Mackintosh Herald Newspaper Building. Unfortunately despite it 
having opened 3 months ago there was still a lot of building work 
going on in the building. Consequently the noise did affect the 
conference. The entrance to the building is quite dark and contains 
freestanding escalators - these have been designed to heighten the 
feeling of the vertical narrow space which rises through four 
storeys - not for the faint hearted or people with vertigo. 
Fortinately there are lifts as an alternative but they have no voice 
announcements in them for visualy impaired people.

The conference itself was very well organised and many interesting 
speakers.

Wycliffe Noble from the British Standards Panel talked about the way 
the BSI produces new BS's and that the BS8300 which brings together 
the different relevant access BS information should be out for 
consultation soon and will be published in 5 parts, starting with 
part 1 in Feb 2001. The parts represent the journey type approach 
with the first part being about access parking, approach, etc. for 
the new BS they have done a lot of checking of ergonomic data at 
Loughborough University - although the data shown did concentrate on 
physical mobility issues and nothing shown on sensory issues. He did 
say that RNID was less contirbutory than RNIB to theie work.

The next speaker was Andrew Wright who provided interesting case 
study material about the difficulty of access and conservation. 
Looked at reversible solutions versus paermanenta nd to avoid 
"bolt-on thinking which leads to bolt-on design". He is involved in 
the NMGM 2001 project in Liverpool which has a good opening up of a 
museum to give access to all through a new entrance with the existing 
one being made redundant.

Stuart MacDonald, the head of The Lighthouse, talked about its 
redevelopment and issues on exhibition design and access - especially 
about intellectual access. The problem here seems to be the 
restrictions placed by exhibitors sending their work to be displayed 
and how much work the Lighthouse have to do to bring the exhibition 
to a more accessible arena.

Paul Stallan from RMJM architects gave a very visual talk on the 
redevelopment of the Tron theatre in Glasgow and on aesthetics 
generally. As aesthetics is my hobby horse I could spend a long time 
debating his interpretation, but will spare you the agony ;-) I do, 
however find most architectural presentations assume that 
architecture is all about visuals - hence 2 projectors and no 
explanation of the slides for those with visual impairments. Also 
despite being given a mike connected to the induction loop he did not 
use it and taked to the screen which would make lip-reading 
difficult. The conference organisers had a Palli-type system running. 
This is the first time I had experienced this - basically a typist 
was using a special keypad to type text into a laptop as the people 
were talking. This came out instantaneously and was quite useful to 
make heavy Scottish accents clear to even me. I was sitting behind 
the person for whose benefit this was being done! What would have 
been even better was if they could hav ehooked it up to a projector 
and had it running as sub-titles in a corner of the room.

The day ended with a Plenary session which had speakers giving 5 
minutes each - Helen Jackson (Access develpoment for Heritage 
Lottery Fund), Ian (Scottich Arts Council) and Ronald Mackass 
(Historic Scotland). ADAPT then demonstrated their CD-Rom "Open 
Sesame" which is a virtual tour of an accessible arts venue. I will 
give the list a separate review of this.

I must congratulate ADAPT for making me most welcome and organising 
such a good event.


marcus
The mind is like a parachute; it works better when it's open.

Rita Newton
SURFACE (Salford University Research Focus on Accessible Environments)
The University of Salford
Bridgewater Building
Salford
M7 9NU
Tel 44 (0) 161 295 5279
Fax 44 (0) 161 295 5011


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%