Running Accessible Meetings and Events

A primer to make the lives of participants with disabilities better.

As someone in technology with a long-standing mobility problem, I have been to a LOT of meetings. Looking just from the perspective of access, most of them have been OK, some have been really good, but some have been embarrassingly difficult and awkward to downright inaccessible.

I’ll start with a couple of items that you should never, ever do.

This is a pet peeve of mine, because I have personally experienced it so many times. I have heard every excuse in the book on this one, usually it is some variation of “but we have such a large group, there is no where else we can do this?” In that case, my response is “it appears to be a gathering that you don’t expect people with disabilities to attend?” Oh, it’s a mandatory meeting you say? My response to that is “You must think your meeting is so important that you are forcing your attendees with disabilities to risk injury to attend.” But you don’t have any people with disabilities attending? (that is a different problem). People with disabilities don’t distinguish between temporary and permanent disabilities. If you work for one group you will work for the other. And no one can prevent a sprained ankle from occurring the day before an event.

99.9 % of the mobility aid using population can’t handle the gopher holes and dips that are in almost every grassy area. Hidden rocks can be a huge danger, as can fellow employees who start behaving like cattle and try to push past or through people with disabilities. If there are chairs, they are usually on uneven ground, uncomfortable, and unstable. And if you put a single seat off the grass, you might as well be screaming “we forgot to think about this.” Here are a couple of things you can do to make this work.

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