Advice and guidance for hosting inclusive university events

• Link to our blog: Accessibility guide for inclusive university events
• Link to our webpage: A conversation about access
• Download a PDF: Easy read accessibility guide
• Download a PDF : Inclusion and Sharing Best Practice for Academic Events Facilitation: WAARC Reflections on the ‘Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions / Intersections / Contradictions’ Conference  (at Durham University)

We want to normalise inclusive events. Our resources seek to address an overarching goal: to ensure that access is embedded, rather than treating access as an afterthought or as a response. Access is not only pragmatic: it is an intellectual phenomenon:

• Daniel P.Jones and Lauren White  published a blog on the National Centre for Research Methods entitled Revisiting access and inclusion in research methods. 

• Ryan Bramley (Education) and WAARC's Kirsty Liddiard, in collaboration with Sheffield-based company Paper, Beth Evans (SUBTXT Creative) and Josh Slack (Inertia Creative), won the University of Sheffield Knowledge Exchange and Impact Awards 2025 in the Outstanding Partnership or Impact in Creativity/Culture/Society category for their projects, Animating Inclusion and Rethinking Subtitles for Deaf Audiences. Poor quality, missing, and/or lagging captions lead to Deaf audiences feeling excluded from cinematic experiences. In response, these projects explored caption quality and accessibility, which resulted in the two short films above, as well as evidence submission to the British Film and High-End Television Inquiry and collaboration with Paramount Pictures to explore implementation of the project’s Six Recommendations for Change into future UK releases. You can view Rethinking Subtitles for Deaf Audiences here; You can view Animating Inclusion here. 

• Antonios Ktenidis's sets out some ideas and principles relating to anti-ableist pedagogy which are relevant to curating accessible events - available to read here