Accessibility
In this section, we cover accessibility for both artists and audiences. Our goal is to ensure that everyone can create, experience, and engage with art with minimal barriers.
Ontario is the first jurisdiction in Canada, through the AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act) to mandate and regulate accessibility standards for public and private sectors in all key areas of daily living. The purpose of the act is to make the province accessible for Ontarians with disabilities by 2025. This regulation applies to every person or organization that provides goods, services, or facilities to the public or third parties and that has at least one employee in Ontario.
Hearing interpreters have to be members of CASLI (Canadian Association of Sign Language Interpreters) in order to work. Deaf Theatre Interpreters have a different scope of interpreting, as it is an artistic field for them. Therefore they require a different set of training, which includes theatre experience/training.
You've made the art, but is your art accessible to people with disabilities? How can producing considerations alter the artistic landscape so that performance can include and involve more audiences?
Making your art accessible goes beyond offering accessible performances. Here are some (but not all) of the considerations you should make when looking at accessibility for your event/production…
Producing live performance usually means producing a lot of content around your event: marketing and communications (like marketing materials, a website, promotional photos, and graphics) to share information about you or your project with an audience; important documents (like contracts, invoices, and schedules) to manage your team and your project; and the scripts and designs that help bring your creative ideas to life.
It is important to create an accessibility statement for all of your events. If you are a venued company, you should also have an accessibility statement for the spaces that you regularly work in. An accessibility statement can be quite broad or quite specific. Remember: each person is unique and you can't know the accessibility needs of everyone curious about your event. It's best to just accurately list the access features of your space, and leave it to those who know their accommodation needs to make their own choices about whether it is accessible for them or not.
Let’s face it, theatre and access aren’t always words we find in the same sentence, even in 2025. Though there is a long way to go - there are ways to start the conversation. Remember - ensuring a theatre space meets your access needs, should NEVER be your sole job, it needs to be a conversation with the producers and facilitators of the process!
Artists who are parents and caregivers have complex access needs that are specific to their caregiving situations; there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to balancing caregiving and art-making. Many intersecting factors can compound the socio-economic burden on artists who are also caregivers.