Our Digital Accessibility Commitments

2.5 minute read

When we use the term digital accessibility, we are referring to the extent to which everybody, regardless of their physical or neurological experience of the world, can engage with online arts and culture content with the same ease.

Our commitments to improving digital accessibility are rooted in our core values.

• We champion open and innovative approaches to digital accessibility as a catalyst for creativity and for discovering improved forms of audience engagement. This is a key factor in our commissioning decisions and the design of our funded programmes.
• We allocate a specific budget for access support for every major programme we run. This budget is used flexibly, depending on the specific needs of the programme and those engaging with it. For example, this might go towards supporting people applying to participate; upskilling those we commission with accessibility skills; or making the way we share learning resources and evaluation reports as accessible as possible. If this budget is ever underspent, we prioritise investing it in access support in other ways.
• In our commissioning open calls for digital content, we always ask applicants how they will prioritise digital accessibility in their approach to content production and distribution. We offer guidance and support to help them to achieve these ambitions.
• We regularly review our website, social media channels and any other digital content we produce to ensure we continue to optimise for digital accessibility in line with changes in technology, industry best practice and audience engagement.
• Wherever practical, we collaborate with independent experts, including those with lived experience of being disabled. This ensures we are aware of new developments in digital accessibility, are responding to a range of perspectives and user needs in our working practices and are robustly evaluating our activities.

We will review these commitments on an annual basis.