Accessibility in the Arts | Disability Arts Online

We are joined by Disability Arts Online CEO Trish Wheatley, to discuss accessibility in the arts and the UK Government Access to Work scheme.

You can learn more about Disability Arts Online here https://disabilityarts.online/

Please note this Podcast is provided for general information only, it does not constitute as medical or professional advice. The views expressed by guests on this Podcast are their own, their inclusion in this Podcast is not an endorsement.

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[Image description: The image has a light cream background with the Disability Arts Online logo. To the right, bold black text reads “Accessibility in the Arts” with the guest organisation's name, “Disability Arts Online” written below in soft teal. Under the text is a teal play button and a horizontal soundwave graphic. At the bottom, a circular logo shows a sky-and-trees scene with the words “Alive with Chronic Illness” around the edge.]

Transcript

Elizabeth 

In today's episode, we're joined by Disability Arts Online CEO, Trish Wheatley, to talk about accessibility in the arts. Thank you so much for coming on today. Did you want to get started by telling us a little bit about you and Disability Arts Online? 

Trish 

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here and it's a great opportunity to talk about Disability Arts Online. First, maybe a little bit about me. I'm Trish. I'm based down in Dorset. I'm the Chief Executive of Disability Arts Online, and I've been with the organisation since 2011. And there I was set up by Colin Hanbrook, the founding editor, who's also a disabled artist and poet in 2004. So I've been with the organisation more than half its existence. So Disability Arts Online was originally set up as an online magazine and an online community to support disabled artists who are working in any art form, whether it's theatre, literature, visual arts, music, to have a place where work is talked about by other disabled people. One of the big issues back then was that artworks were not being discussed within mainstream criticism and by like newspaper critics. And if it was, then it was being done really badly because they didn't really understand the disabled experience. So Colin set up this space where we could review and critique work and discuss it in a more informed way to help artists to develop. And then the other side was, you know, really about developing a community of artists. So our blogs on our website have been central for a long time now, and that's a space where anyone can get involved and talk about anything as long as it's sort of vaguely related to arts and culture. 

Elizabeth 

Amazing. So you've really seen the charity grow and those changes over those years then? 

Trish 

Yeah, when I joined back in 2011, Colin was just on his own in a little office in Brighton, so it was just me and him. running things. I was brought in to help develop the kind of business side of the organisation. And so we put together projects that would help develop writers and things like that, and also run the online journal. And then in around 2015, 2016, we really started to ramp up the organisational development. We brought in another team member, Joe Turnbull, who's now our Digital Operations Manager. and he worked with us on those projects, and eventually we got to get more funding specifically through Arts Council England. We became a national portfolio organisation in 2018, which means we get multi-year funding essentially so less reliance on projects, project funding. And then we've also had various other funders like Paul Hamlin Foundation and Esme Fairburn Foundation supporting us in multi-year ways. And what that does I mean, for the people that we support is it provides stability. So we can do like year round programmes and things that aren't just stop starts, which is really wonderful and it's really enabled us to grow and grow. And so now we have a team of nine working across four main areas of work. So we have our creative programme, which includes the magazine. It also includes a new gallery space called This Place. and our events programme. And then we also have a talent development programme which is aimed really at supporting artists who need extra support because of the barriers they face to the arts and culture sector. So we do that through one-to-one sessions and webinars and also an associates programme. And we also do quite a lot of sector support. So we're working with theatre companies, arts development agencies, and other kind of arts and culture and heritage organisations to help them be more accessible for disabled artists and audiences. So we do training and get in there, help them develop their policies, and sometimes we work on partnership programmes too. And then our fourth area of work is more internal, looking at our own organisational practices, making sure that they're really accessible and kind of innovating new ways of working. We're a completely remote organisation and it enables, you know, seven out of nine of us who are disabled. So it's enabling people to have careers in the arts. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, that's amazing. I think the fact that yours is remote and that you can just access it online from anywhere, that it does, like you said, that like a lot of the work you do really, not only do you say, we're going to try and make this more inclusive, we're going to try and make sure that people can access this, but you do it. You make sure that it's inclusive. You get those options out there and then you put in place, like you said, the one-to-one work you do with people who might have barriers so that you're not even, you know, you're going above, like not above and beyond, but just really, A lot of places will say they want to be inclusive and that they want to be accessible. And I think you are a really great example of that actually happening in practice and people seeing that impact and getting that support, which I think is amazing. 

Trish 

Oh, thank you. That's great. One of the other things I'm really proud of is how intersectional we are as well. As a community of disabled people, you know, disability intersects across all other kind of aspects of marginalisation. And so we really try and foreground work by people who have kind of intersecting different marginalised identities. And that's been something we've really pushed over the last few years. And just that sort of adds to that inclusivity, I think, making sure that we're representing people from lots of different backgrounds and walks of life. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, making sure that you're representing everyone. 

Trish 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Elizabeth 

So with your remote events, so you've got a program that runs throughout the year. Do you have anything that happens quite regularly or do they tend to be like ran in sets? 

Trish 

Oh, that's a really good question. And we kind of experiment with this a bit, so I'm not quite sure how to answer it. But so what we do online, well, so the magazine is we're publishing stuff every week and we put out a newsletter every week. With the events-based stuff, it's a little bit more irregular, I would say. We aim to deliver four main events each year, and that's usually something like a discussion session around a particular kind of hot topic within the arts at the moment, or it might be more showcasing some work and then having artists discussing that. And so we do four of those a year and then interspersed between those, we also do webinars on some of the kind of most needed topics. A lot of the most recent work we've done is around Access to Work and the way that changes have come into Access to Work kind of without many announcements and how people are dealing with that. So yeah, giving really clear information on how to apply to Access to Work and how to keep your grant. So yeah, usually those are kind of artist focus or creative worker focus to help people with their careers in the arts, whereas the events are more of interest to industry, but can also be of interest to audiences too. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. And you mentioned access to work there. And that is something that I think it's quite interesting the way you sort of said that this haven't really been announced the changes. And I'm sort of aware that changes have happened because I've heard people speaking about them, but I'm not fully aware of what they are. And I think it's actually great to see somewhere actually coming out and saying, this is actually what's going on and clearly in an accessible way communicating that so that people do know. Because I wonder like why that's been done that way. Why have there not been announced since? Why does there seem like there hasn't been much consultation on that? 

Trish 

Yeah, it's an interesting one, isn't it? When the narrative is all about getting disabled people into work. We're in a really unique position at Disability Arts Online. We run a program called Decode, which is in partnership with Cathy Waller Company, and Decode was set up literally to decode the Access to Work system and help explain it to people, because We discovered that so many individual artists, because they're freelancers, they didn't get help from organisations to apply. And so we wrote a guide about Access to Work, which is available on our website. And then we started doing webinars and training and one-to-one sessions specifically about applying to Access to Work and helping people through that process. So that unique position is because we've helped hundreds of people through the process. So we've been able to see the trends in what's happening in each case. And what we found, we published a research report right at the beginning of the Access to Work campaign back in May. And what that report found was that across the board, people applying to renew their grant were getting their grant slashed by significant amounts. Both the hourly rate for support workers and the number of hours that was being offered was being completely cut. And it's taken us a long time to get clarity from Access to Work about why that was. Essentially, Access to Work has a fixed budget for the year. And because of the increase in the numbers of people applying, they are going over that budget. And so they have. They're basically more stringent, being more stringent about applying the policy that already exists. But as we have seen. the application of that policy is very inconsistent. So people are getting a really, really different experience of the service in terms of those renewals and new applications also being affected by, yeah, different decision making to what's happened before. So there hasn't been a change in policy, it's just how it's applied. So for the future, there are going to be changes coming down the line to access to work. They haven't yet been decided or agreed, but we are talking to the Department for Work and Pensions about the needs specifically of self-employed people because they tend not to get so represented in these conversations and policy development. 

Elizabeth 

And I suppose, and I don't know what the figures off the top of my head, but there is like a maximum amount that each individual who applies for Access Work is entitled to. So I guess that hasn't necessarily changed. But because across the board, they're trying to reduce costs, even if you are still individually entitled to that amount, you might still not actually be getting that level of support. 

Trish 

Yeah, that's right. And every assessment is based on the minimum need that the customer has. So You can't go in there going, oh, it would be nice to have this or it might make my life a little bit easier. It's really about. I cannot work unless I have these things met. Yeah. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. So very much the bare minimum people need in order to access their work. And that they keep it very much at that line. And I guess it's kind of difficult sometimes as to who gets to decide what the bare minimum for a person is and what is the. criteria for that? 

Trish 

Exactly. I mean, the Access to Work actually have a really difficult job because the case managers are not particularly specialists in any particular conditions or impairments. They're also not industry specialists because they have to deal with every different type of job. There is a specific self-employed department within Access to Work, but still, a freelance electrician is going to be very different from a freelance actor and the needs that they have, the access requirements to be met, the reasonable adjustments to be made are going to be very, very different depending on what job you do and what situation you're in. So I do, I see that they have a difficult job, but what we see is inconsistency in that decision making around the evidence that's been put to them. And that's that. Yeah, that's the thing that's made it so difficult and and really sparked the fire in us to campaign for a for a better access to work and make sure people know how to get the support they need through through the system. 

Elizabeth 

Because absolutely, because if they haven't got specialist knowledge at all about other conditions or maybe even, because I know that there were some benefits, I think with PIP, they tend to be medically trained in some way, the assessors. So not even having that, I suppose, from the respect of being an access to work assessor, if I could speak, an access to work assessor, that must, like you said, that'd be really challenging just to get an idea of what should I be providing to this person, just to make sure that they're actually providing everything that they should be. providing to them. And that lack of specialist knowledge about individual conditions might mean that something that you could actually access, that might actually be the difference between being able to stay in your job and not being able to stay in your job, that just gets overlooked or missed because they just don't have that knowledge. 

Trish 

Yeah, that's right. I think it's. what they should be basing it on is the individual's experience and what they know about their own access requirements. And there are, they do have specialist assessors. I'd have to defer to my colleague Cathy to know whether they were medically trained or not. I'm not actually sure on that, but they do have assessors that you can be referred to when you go through the application process to better understand what support might be suitable for you if you're not so familiar with what's out there. But yeah, even then, the case managers don't always take the advice of the assessors. So it's then, you know, kind of sat left wondering what was the point in that? 

Elizabeth 

So there's a lot of inconsistency there, even like you said, with not necessarily always taking the recommendations by the assessors. And that must make it difficult, especially if you've had support. And like you said, then all of a sudden, it's just been cut and you've had the rate or the amount of hours cut. And then you've run a difficult position of being in your work, you're already working and trying to, I guess, sustain that. And have you noticed that that's had a knock-on effect? Has anyone had to, has anyone reported to you needing to reduce their hours or not being able to work because of those changes? 

Trish 

We've had a few people saying that they haven't been able to take on significant size contracts because they can't confirm that they're going to have access support workers. So people are definitely losing work. The most well-known example was Jess Tom, who runs Tourette's Hero, which is an amazing arts organisation. And she had her support slashed by, I think it was 63% and And so she was and she she was amazing in that she went public with it. She wrote to her MP, she put in a reconsideration, but she also went to the press and put pressure on Access to Work to reconsider their decision because and and she stopped work because because of it. So she announced that she was no longer going to be the artistic director of Tourette's Heria because she literally couldn't. The support wasn't there for her to be able to do her job. And I think, you know, with that public pressure, Access to Work changed their mind and she got it reinstated, which is amazing. 

Elizabeth 

I think it's brilliant that she felt able to go out there and say, This is what's happened, this is what's happened. And it then was reversed as a result. there'll be a lot of people who aren't in a position where they can come out publicly or haven't got that kind of, I guess, profile to be able to do that, are in a similar position. But it might just make someone think, oh, actually, I can ask for a reconsideration. They might not even know that that's available and that's an option. So any discussions about it, I think, are really important. But I think it's just such a shame when we seem to be having a lot of discussions about supporting disabled people into work, or maybe not supporting disabled people into work, but maybe discussions about disabled people needing to be in work. But there's actually a lack of support. Because my experience is that disabled people want to work, but they can't always access it. And if we can deal with the barriers of access, then more and more people can go into work. And a lot of disabled people do work already as well, and will have been benefiting from the access to work. Although the changes now might actually threaten the people who are already in there, if they're going to lose a lot of support potentially, that might mean that a lot of people who have been employed, that might not be as viable an option for them. 

Trish 

Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree with you. And, you know, Access to Work is actually only one part of that whole kind of environment of making the workplace accessible. So we've been doing some other work recently to help employers to create more accessible workplaces as well. So we've recently published a resource on that to kind of share some of our learning as an employer. and share some best practice that we've learned across the sector around actually right from the recruitment stage. How can you make sure that you are an accessible and inclusive employer and you're meeting your not only meeting your obligations, but actually making the workplace a really great place for disabled people to work? 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, making sure that it is accessible. I think that work is really important as well. And obviously, there's a lot of change, I think, societally and just more widely that needs to happen to just be able to facilitate that support. I think even within like healthcare, just making sure that if you have a chronic condition, that you can get a medical appointment. Because if you're waiting weeks to be able to get a medical appointment for treatment that might actually improve your quality of life and actually therefore enable you to work, that's not going to help things either being in that dynamic. So yeah, I do agree. I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done across the board there. 

Trish 

Yeah, absolutely. 100%. I think one of you know, one of the things that arts and culture does actually, and more generally is is help people to stay well and help people to be connected and and reduce the burden on the health services. So You know, this is one of the arguments, isn't it? So, yeah, I think, you know, one of the things about Disability Arts Online that I love is when people come to us and they say, Oh, I'd never heard of you before, and I found your website just by chance, and I just didn't know this whole world of disability arts existed. And what they mean by that is, they've kind of been living in a in a kind of medicalised view of disability. And then understanding that there is such a thing as disability culture. And there has been a whole history of disabled people fighting for rights and making comedy and theatre and shows and musicals, whatever, about their lived experience and about that fight for rights. It's just such a wonderful thing when people come to us and say, you've opened our eyes to this whole thing. And I'm sure that kind of finding your tribe and finding your community really does help with health and wellbeing. It really does. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, it helps with isolation enormously because you're around people who understand what it's like and you don't have to then feel like you're showing up in spaces with people who don't get it. That you can turn up and you can share your art and you can talk about things while knowing that people to a certain level understand and definitely empathize with the challenges you might face and being able to access things. So I think that's, I think it is a really important thing to have as many communities as possible, particularly ones like yours where you can access it online. So even if you're well enough to go somewhere in person, you can still access it and you're still part of it and you're still an equal part of it, even if you can't physically get to a location. Because a lot of things within the arts that I've seen have been, which it does make sense, but they're often in galleries and community centres, but people can't always get out to go to those. 

Trish 

Yeah, definitely. And that's one of our promises we made quite a long time ago is that, because we do do in-person events occasionally, but I don't know, about five or six years ago, we made the promise that if we ever do an in-person event, which is sort of ticketed and open to the public, then we will always offer a hybrid online option. Because we know, yeah, there are lots of people in our community who are not able to get to those venues and or wouldn't be safe for for people to attend in person. So yeah, we do. I just totally totally empathise with that. And you know, there's lots of sort of other things that we do along those lines to to kind of support people where they're at, where where they live. So yeah, the launch of this place, our online gallery, has been a big step towards that, because previously our website was very much about talking about art. We showcased it in a kind of small way, but now having a purpose built digital gallery is a really, really important step, because you, the audience, wherever you are, are experiencing it in exactly the same way, because there isn't an in-person option. And it's so it's kind of digital first, really kind of commissioning new works and programming really sort of cutting edge, interesting, interesting work that's just at the forefront of debate around disability, neurodivergence and yeah, the issues that disabled people face. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, and I think that's one thing that art does. It does many things very well, but one thing I particularly like is the way that it enables people to communicate in so many different ways about these topics, like showcasing sort of issues throughout history about disability and the people who have fought for our rights throughout history and people who have messages, who have things they want to say. And that's not always something that people feel like they can convey with words, but they can convey it with art, with a painting, with dance, but there's so many different ways you can convey meaning and messages that don't even need words. And that's something that I always find incredibly powerful about art as a method of communication. 

Trish 

Yeah, definitely. And I think, I mean, certainly kind of in relation to neurodivergence, art is, such a good method of expression. And so if you are predominantly a visual thinker, then you go into visual arts, or if you're a predominantly kind of sound driven, then maybe it's music or sound art or film or something that is the best way for you to communicate. I think There's sort of, there's a lot of expectation on people, mainly through education, to use, you know, written English or spoken English, and that's your sort of main way of communicating. But just look at all the amazing work that's done with kind of creative signing within theatre and movements. And yeah, there's loads and loads of examples of just different ways of communicating that are just, they're they're born from lived experience of disability, but they create something so powerful and meaningful for for for lots of people. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, and builds that community. And yeah, I think it just it is lovely to have things that connect us. I think that's so important. Particularly with, we talked about isolation already, it's such a big thing within the disabled community. I think it's a big thing in society more widely at the moment as well. But having as many spaces as possible where you can come as you are and you can express yourself in where the way you feel comfortable, rather than, like you said there, this idea that we should be able to write things down. If you can't write an essay about it, what's the point? And that's the thing is that there are so many ways of saying things. You don't have to say it in an essay. You don't have to do it that way. And I think breaking against that mould of we have to communicate in a certain way, or this is what should look like and actually saying communication can look like so many different things. I do think that's very beautiful. So as we're coming up to the end, I thought we would just finish by, I guess we have an overview. If anyone is sort of listening and they're thinking about looking for some support, maybe they are an artist and they're thinking about going freelance. What can they come to you for? What support is available? 

Trish 

Well, for artists, there's kind of several different strands. And firstly, the blogging platform that we have, it's in the community section of our website. That's a really good space to connect with other creatives to actually showcase your work. If you're a poet or a visual artist or you can embed video there, that's a really good space to become known. And then alongside that, if you're into Facebook, we have a really kind of strong community in our Facebook group. So there's a lots of ways to interact there. But if you actually need sort of more sort of directed support with something that you're like a challenge you're facing or you're not sure how to kind of develop your career, then our resources section is a really good place to go. We produce resources, but we don't just do that. We also showcase all like lots of our partner organisation resources. So it's all collect collected in one place. It's an easy place to just sort of trawl through them and see what's there. And all of our resources are as accessible as they can be. So we tend to produce easy read versions and text-based and audio versions. So you can just kind of listen to it like a podcast as well. And sometimes there's videos as well and BSL video. We also do one-to-one sessions. They're quite heavily oversubscribed, so I'm not quite sure how much to say they're available. But yeah, we do do one-to-one sessions and we release availability periodically for those. But do look out for our webinars because what we do is we pack all the most kind of ask for information into those webinars from the one-to-ones so that we can reach more people with all of that information. We should be doing one or two of those early next year. So look out for those. And the best way to find out about all of our stuff is to sign up to the newsletter and our social media. 

Elizabeth 

Wonderful, thank you. And I'll pop links to that in the description as well so people can just click on over. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on for sharing that. It's been brilliant. 

Trish 

Oh, thank you so much. 

Elizabeth 

To learn more about Disability Arts Online, check out the links in the description. To receive all of our latest updates, sign up for the podcast or our newsletter. And as always, thanks for listening. 

Please note this transcript is automatically generated and many contain errors.