Arts Access Hub: A New Resource for Cultural Accessibility

NEFA welcomes New England's cultural sector to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (July 26) and Disability Pride Month by watching this webinar with our colleagues at Open Door Arts.

Open Door Arts shared an inside look at the Arts Access Hub—a groundbreaking, free digital resource designed to support cultural organizations across the country in their accessibility efforts. Launching in August 2025, the Hub will bring together over 50 web pages of expert-vetted content, a comprehensive self-assessment tool, curated rosters of accessibility experts, and more. Co-created with a national team of over 40 leaders in the field, this one-of-a-kind platform offers practical tools and guidance to help cultural organizations of all types and sizes advance accessibility. This session introduces the Hub’s features and explore how your organization can use them to drive lasting change, foster true inclusion for people with disabilities, and help transform the cultural sector into a more equitable and accessible space for all.

Read the Transcript

Ann Wicks: We are grateful to have all of you here with us today. I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping for everyone. First I want to introduce myself. I'm Ann Wicks, I'm NEFA's communications director, a middle aged white lady with reading glasses and microphone and earbuds and a green top. I wanted to tell you that we should have external CART, however, we were having some technical challenges getting that set up. So hopefully that's something we'll be able to get sorted out. And I do apologize for that. A little bit of housekeeping. We have on the bottom of your screen both a chat button and a Q and A button. Later when we have the panel, we will ask you to use the Q and Q section in order to submit your questions to the panel. The chat, please, thank you for folks who are introducing themselves already, please feel free to let us know if you're having any access issues and know that we are trying to sort out the CART issue. I want to thank everyone for joining us to celebrate what is the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Oh, thank you Amanda. Sorry about that. But that's our captioner, so we'll need to get her connected. We're celebrating this 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disability Act. And we are honored to have our friends at Open Door Arts here to share a ton of important resources. We're also celebrating Disability Pride month. I don't want to leave that out. So there is a lot to celebrate despite the challenges that we're all dealing with in this current moment. Doing this work to serve our communities, to increase your outreach, to increase your audiences, and create new relationships is so important. And you know, as the we like to say about Gravity, it's not just a good idea, it's the law. It's something that I am very lucky to be able to work on with my New England accessibility, coordinator colleagues from the New England State Arts agencies. And I know most of them are here and they have allowed me to share their contact information. In case you are not aware of who the accessibility coordinator is in your state. I'm also going to share, no, I think I won't do that today. Sorry, I was going to share a photo of everybody, but honestly with the technical challenge, it may not work, but it is an excellent group. I will note that New Hampshire is not listed there right now because they're going through some staff restructuring based on some recent budget cuts, but they remain a partner and we remain focused on supporting them and our New Hampshire colleagues. So I'm going to then turn it over to Nicole and Portia from Open Door Arts to talk about their work and I will, I will leave you to it. Thank you.

Nicole Agois: Thank you so much, Ann. Hello everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here with all of you. It's wonderful to see how many people are in the Zoom today, despite it being a lovely, maybe too lovely summer day. So we're really excited to be with you today and wanted to first share some gratitude with NEFA and Ann and her team for hosting this webinar today. I also wanted to share some gratitude with Charles Baldwin, who's in the room, and the Mass Cultural Council who have been just fantastic partners and supporters of our work from the very beginning. So just wanted to start with those acknowledgements. We're really excited to introduce you to the Arts and Culture Accessibility Hub, which is an upcoming website that will be launched in the month of August. And we're going to tell you a little bit about what it is, how it was created, what you will find when you go to the hub. And it's essentially a space where arts and culture organizations can find information resources of folks to connect with training opportunities to increase their accessibility. So we're very excited to share this, especially as Ann said, during Disability Pride Month because we know that the work is really important, ever evolving, and and we're really, really excited that we are doing it together as a sector. We're going to introduce ourselves in just a minute. Just to give you a quick orientation of what we're going to be doing today. We're going to be speaking for about the next 45 to 50 minutes. We have a wonderful colleague who today who's going to be talking about the impact of some of this work on her organization. And then we're going to have about 10 to 15 minutes for Q and A at the end. We're going to be sharing slides and I will describe any visual information on the slides for access. This intro slide has the Arts and Culture Accessibility Hub logo. It says Arts and Culture Accessibility Hub, a project of Open Door Arts, and it has a graphic of a colorful star kind of pentagon shape. And at the bottom of the slide is the, what will be the website of the Arts Access Hub, which is www.artsaccesshub.org. If you visit the website right now, because it is still under construction, you will just have the opportunity to put your email address to join a mailing list so that as soon as the hub is available you will be the first to be notified. So with that, again, welcome. It's wonderful to to be with you all. We're going to do some quick introductions if we are new to you. Open Door Arts is a Massachusetts-based arts and culture organization that uniquely works at the intersection of disability, arts and culture, and education. And our mission is to promote access, representation, and participation of people with disabilities in our arts and cultural community. A little bit about ourselves and before we introduce ourselves, I just wanted to name something really important, which is that the the folks who are going to be speaking to you today, we are representing a very, very large and fantastic group of experts. There are about 35 experts from around the country who have come together as consultants, as supporters, as content creators, as web builders, as access testers, you know, really writing every single word of this website and creating every single resource on this website. So it's been a really true labor of love. You'll get to meet them once we launch the Hub. We share information about every single one of them. But just saying that Dani, Portia, and I are speaking on behalf of a really large fantastic group of folks who have created this resource together. So with that, I'm Nicole Agois. My pronouns are she/her. I am a light-skinned Latina woman in my forties. And on this slide there is a black and white photo of me. I have shoulder length brown hair, I'm smiling in front of artwork by Igshaan Adams at the ICA. I've been with Open Door Arts for 20 years, first leading our education programs and for the past eight years as managing director. And with that I'm going to pass it to Dani.

Dani Rose: Hello, I'm Dani Rose, I use she/her pronouns. I identify as neurodivergent and I'm a white, AFAB, queer brunette with bangs in my black and white photo. I'm smiling big and wearing a plaid dress with a black cardigan against a plain gray background. I'm a certified ADA coordinator, accessibility strategist. And as of Monday, I'm the new director of cultural access at Open Door Arts. I've been working on these tools as a consultant for a while, but as it's my third official day on the job, I'm going to leave it to Portia and Nicole today to talk to you. And with that I'll pass to Portia.

Portia Brown: Thanks Dani. And so excited to have Dani with us on our team. My name is Portia Brown, I use she/her pronouns. The slide shows a black and white photo of me standing in front of the same awesome piece of artwork described by Nicole. I'm a white woman in my forties with long blonde hair. I identify as a non-disabled advocate, ally, and family member of people with disabilities. I'm a certified accessibility coordinator, former special education teacher. And before joining Open Door Arts, I led the accessibility and community programming for Boston Ballet. In my director now, or in my role now as a director of operations at ODA, I get the pleasure of focusing a lot on finding and creating solutions that can make things more effective, enjoyable, and easy for our team and our constituents. And hopefully today you'll sort of see how that approach and that mindset kind of informed all of the tools that we are going to be sharing more about today. So with that, we want to give a little bit of background on the need. As you'll probably hear from all of us, a lot of these tools are long-term labors of love that have been years in the making with, as Nicole mentioned, you know, 35, 45 plus people, experts, helping develop them. And so they didn't just come out of nowhere, right? And they didn't just come for sort of no reason. We really found a lot of needs and the specific needs of our community, of our constituents really informed the creation of these tools. So for about three years in partnership with Massachusetts Cultural Council, we conducted research to better understand the state of accessibility in the Massachusetts arts and culture sector. We've published those reports and we will share the link later in a two-part report titled 'Towards A Culture of Access.' The first part examined the perspectives and practices of cultural organizations and the second part examined the perspectives of people with disabilities. This included artists and cultural workers and caregivers of people with disabilities as well. And so through these studies we really wanted to find out kind of, you know, what was happening, what was working, what was not. And we learned some really interesting things. And what was also interesting is that these findings underscored and supported a lot of what we had been hearing and experiencing anecdotally in our work in the field. As you know, a trainer, a consultant, and an organization that was working to support not only cultural organizations, but also people with disabilities, artists with disabilities, and students with disabilities. So again, you'll be able to read those full reports, but some highlights that really drove our work: we found that organizations vary greatly in how their understanding, assessing, and actualizing their accessibility. This variation from cultural organizations is leading directly to fatigue, distrust, and harm for people with disabilities. So in the second part of our report, we found that only 6% of people with disabilities said that it was easy to request access services or accommodations when visiting arts and cultural organizations. We also learned on the flip side that people with disabilities would be much more likely to frequent and visit our arts and culture organizations if they knew they would be accessible. So in fact, 72% of respondents in our research said that they would be more likely to visit arts and cultural organizations if they knew or could feel more confident that their access needs would be met. We also learned that organizations want to be more accessible and believe that they should be accountable. And I'm sure that's what brought a lot of us here today, right? We want to do this work, we want to do it better, but being accessible can feel totally overwhelming. And we heard that loud and clear from organizations. It's hard to know where to begin, it's hard to know what to do, it feels too big. And organizations just kind of feel unsure of how to take that first step and what that even looks like. And then finally, kind of in addition to those 'Towards a Culture of Access' reports, we did a lot of our own research analyzing tools that already existed to support organizations with accessibility. And just found that the things out there right now were incomplete. Even thinking about our own desires as an organization, the things that were available to us, you know, were either too expensive, they weren't disability centered, they weren't comprehensive enough, they weren't specific to arts and culture organizations, right? We couldn't find tools and resources that checked all of the boxes. And so that led us to really say, you know what? There's a gap, there's a need for us for our colleagues and we've got to take this moment to fill that gap and address these needs. So our solution is the hub that you'll be hearing more about and that will be launching in August. The hub is going to be a one stop shop website that's going to help all of us improve our accessibility. The hub is going to have centralized accessibility information and vetted resources by people that are doing this work and doing this work well. There's going to be a full accessibility self-assessment tool, which is already available to help you understand how you're doing right now. There will be training modules so that you can become a certified accessibility professional. There will be expert directories to help us all connect to the people and service providers and experts that we need to grow our work. And then there are a lot of additional tools that include a glossary, a legal identification tool, and some other things that we'll talk more about during this presentation. The hub is completely free. We wanted this. This is, you know, sort of a a critical component in developing all of these resources. We did not want costs to be a barrier or a reason that stopped organizations from growing their accessibility work. And then all of the content, tools, resources, everything on the hub is co-created and disability centered. So the experts, the individuals creating all these things are people who identify as disabled and who are part of the disability community as well as people who have roles in arts and culture organizations. So understanding kind of all the aspects of the work that we're doing. And then hopefully, as I sort of alluded to earlier, all of the tools and resources should be not only accessible but easy to use. We wanted things to be straightforward, easy to find, lots of scaffolding. So no matter where you are, you can enter, you can learn and you can grow from them. Great. So within the hub and all of those different resources, what we're hoping is that you'll find everything you need to kind of help you along your access journey and take those really good intentions that we know we all have and turn them into impactful action, right? Making change for your organization, which is going to result in change for our field, which is going to result in change for people with disabilities. Whether those are your patrons, your employees, your board, your leadership, right? It's going to create change for all. And we think that that can happen through this cycle, this process where you can start by assessing, learning how you're doing, what you're doing well, where the gaps are. Then creating a plan for addressing those gaps, creating an accessibility plan that will help lead your organization and your work forward. Being able to connect to all the experts, tools, and resources that you might need to help you along the way and learn all the content information, best practices, legal requirements, right, that might be associated with some of the accessibility practices that we're trying to put into place. So everything you'll need to hopefully move you into that implementation stage right where you and your organization can really start to do the work, do the work well, and feel, you know, prepared, excited, and ready to engage with that process. Nicole's now going to walk us through some of the tools and resources more specifically that go through this cycle so you can really understand when you get to the hub, how you can engage and benefit kind of in every step of the process.

Nicole: Great, thank you so much Portia. This is Nicole. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to walk you through each of these five, as Portia said, five stages of the cycle and map out some of the tools and resources that we have created that are going to be part of the hub so that you can get to familiarize yourself with them. And I will be screen sharing some of those tools and resources so that you get to see what they look like and how to find them, et cetera. So we're going to get started, we're going to start in the same process, in the same order that Portia just laid out for us. So we're going to start with assess and plan. So with assess, as Portia said, you know it's really complicated and not very productive to make a plan for improving your accessibility or to really move your work forward without really understanding where you currently are. How accessible are we right now and how do we know? You know, it's really hard to know that. So we created the arts and culture accessibility self-assessment tool. Many of you in the room may have heard about it. Some of you in the room may have already even taken the self-assessment and, and so the self-assessment is a very comprehensive tool. It is, it has approximately 300 questions. So it's very detailed and really helping you understand the nuance of accessibility. So not just like kind of lumping things into big categories, but really trying to unpack them so that you can really go deep. It's a fully electronic self-assessment. So it is all online and it's easy to share with your coworkers, et cetera. And it also balances both legal compliance with humanity with best practices. Again, it was written with experts with disabilities and really balances both the, you know, human-centered best practices with legal compliance. The self-assessment is organized into five broad categories that cover, again, all of these different aspects of organizational accessibility. And those five categories are organizational approach. So these are your policies, your hiring, your systems, some of the key practices that organizations need to have in place and access services, which are services that you provide to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, to engage with your organization space, which is everything related to physical space and the navigation of that physical space communication. So how you communicate the offerings that you have available and how you make sure that you communicate in accessible ways. And last is programming. So every type of programming events that you, that you conduct, how do we make those accessible? So those are the five broad categories and I'll show you what that looks like. Also, we created what we call the ADA/504 ID tool, which is a very simple questionnaire that helps you identify which legal responsibilities apply to your organization, your unique organization based on those organizational specific things around your organization that make them either applicable or not applicable. So we will show you in a minute what that looks like. Moving into plan, once you complete your self-assessment, the self-assessment automatically generates a report. The report will give you, and I'm going to show you what it looks like, it's going to turn your responses from the self-assessment into a report format that uses scores, numerical scores to report back what you said. Those scores are organized by full organizational, the full self-assessment score, and then scores for each of the sections and then scores for subsections. Again, I will show you what that looks like and this is where you start to get a sense of how you are doing in a way that is kind of visually represented so that it's more digestible within the report. There is information and guidance to help you to turn the learning from the self-assessment process into action. And it helps you to really start prioritizing the areas that need most attention and to create, to give you step-by-step guidance to create an accessibility plan. So an accessibility plan is essentially a document where you outline items that need improvement and then a plan to ensure that those changes are made within a certain period of time. We give you accessibility plan templates so that you can, go ahead and use them as either directly as a template or to use them to design your own accessibility plan. So there's a lot of guidance around that. I'm going to screen share now, but I just want to share that I'm not going to be going into into great detail. But we do have a similar session to today that we have done just about the self-assessment, where we walk you through the self-assessment in great detail and all of the elements of the self-assessment in great detail. And so my colleagues are going to share a link to that session in the chat. It has ASL interpretation and captions as well. So if you want to watch that you can to get a little bit more information about the self-assessment process. Also, right now the self-assessment hub is in a separate website, which is www.artsaccessresources.org. It will be on the hub website once the hub is launched, but in the meantime, if you want to take a look at it and use the self-assessment, please feel free to go through that website and that will also be shared in the chat. So with that I'm going to do a quick screen share and show you some of the things that I just spoke about. The first thing I wanted to show you is the ADA/504 tool. Again, this is a, a tool that helps you identify your legal responsibilities. So it's a very straightforward questionnaire, it has 12 simple yes or no questions. And based on the responses that you give to those questions which ask you about certain organizational characteristics, you will submit this at the bottom and you're going to get a report. And the report is going to tell you based on the responses to your questions, which parts of disability laws. So for example, titles of the ADA or sections of the Rehabilitation Act apply to your organization so you have a better understanding what your legal responsibilities are and it'll help you prepare to take the self-assessment once you get started with that. So we really recommended this process to go through before you take the self-assessment. Alright, great. So with that again, you would go to the self-assessment, the link is in the chat for now, and it will also be linked within the hub when the hub is ready. This is the landing page of a self-assessment, again, it's fully electronic. We recommend that you start by reading the self-assessment guide, which is up here at the top, which just helps you to prepare for the process of taking the self-assessment. You will be prompted to enter your email address in this bar at the bottom of this intro screen. Once you enter an email address, you will receive an email with a unique link. And with that link you can come back to your self-assessment and take it over as long a period of time as you need. So that's the unique link that you will use moving forward. But if you hit next, it will also take you in there. So there's two ways to access it, just make sure you enter an email address here. And I also want to just state that nowhere in the self-assessment we ask for your organization's name. So the self-assessment is meant to be as it's called, a self-assessment, not an audit, right? We are not assessing, no one outside of your organization is assessing your accessibility other than yourself. So this is really a process for you. We are not going to ask you for your organization's name. The email address is so that you can, you know, get that unique link. You can use a personal email address if you prefer. But again, just wanted to make sure that was clear. With that, I'm going to get into the first section of the self-assessment. As I mentioned earlier, the self-assessment is divided into five sections, five areas of accessibility. The first one is organizational approach. We have an introduction, there's a video version of the introduction. We share some resources that are helpful in every single one of these sections and I'll just briefly show you what the assessment itself looks like. So within these, each of these five areas, we have some subcategories. So in this case, under organizational approach, for example, we have a subsection called Values, beliefs, and Mindsets. And for each of these sections we have a number of questions and then we have six response choices. So for every question, your choices are fully true, mostly true, somewhat true, not true, and then also not sure and not applicable. So you can determine which of these is most accurate response to the question. We get a lot of questions around, well what is the difference between fully true and mostly true? And again, it is a self-assessment. So this is for you to determine. We also encourage you to really think about whether you should mark an A response as not applicable. So there is often, there are things that are not yet in place that we might consider not applicable, but maybe they are applicable, it's just not something that we have in place right now. So if that's the case, really challenge yourself to think about whether it's just not true yet, but then something that would be a great thing for us to discuss for our accessibility plan. Very quickly I also want to show there are some words. So for example, in this section here, the word intersectionality is a hyperlink and I'm hovering over it and you'll see a popup that is a glossary term. We have identified about a hundred words that are part of a glossary of terms. We wanted to make sure that as you go along the self-assessment there are opportunities for learning and for kind of a common understanding of vocabulary so that we are all having the same conversation. So you can click on the words and it will take you to an external glossary or you can hover over and it'll pop up. We know that's not screen reader accessible, so there are multiple ways to get to the glossary, but you will see many of those glossary words hyperlink throughout the assessment so that you can learn as you go along. I won't show you everything, but I'm just like scrolling through so that you can see that each of the sections has multiple subsections and a certain number of questions. So this is the organizational approach section as I said. Next is space. This is about physical space and navigating the space. Then we have access services, then we have communication, and we have programming. And again, all of those, all of those have again a number of sections and several questions within them. So with that, once you are done taking the self-assessment, you have answered all of the questions you are going to receive automatically on the screen and also in an email. So you will get an email, at the email address that you use. You're going to receive a report. So right now I'm screen sharing the report. As I mentioned earlier, the report helped stick the responses that you provided to the self-assessment and turn them into numerical scores. So for example, if you said fully true to everything, that's 100. If you said not true, that's zero. And then everything in between. So it's just a a literal representation of the responses that you provided. If you said unsure or not applicable or if you simply didn't answer a question, it will not factor those in. It will not zero them out, they will not not count. So I just wanted to make that clear. So you will get one overall score for your entire assessment. And then we start to break this up. So this is where you start to see how your organization is doing in those five different areas. So for example, here at a glance we might see that we are doing best in the programming area and the lowest score was access services. We start to see some trends and then we're going to break it up even further into those subcategories. So for example, under organizational approach, we're going to give you subsection scores for each of those subsections. So here you start to see for example, that accountability was scored lower than many of the other areas and that grievance was scored the lowest. So those, these visual scores start to help you to think about how you might organize the process of creating your accessibility plan, what you learn after you review these scores. These reports have been really helpful. We have heard from many of our partner organizations that they have been really helpful in order to bring this information to your board, to your leadership, to other members of your team so that you can all look at the same information and be able to process it together. I'm going to scroll very quickly through this to show you the next part of the report, which is where we provide some support to help you create an accessibility plan. And this is incredibly important because an accessibility plan is where you actually turn, again, as Portia was saying earlier, you go from intention to assessment to action, accessibility guidance here is going to help you to, with a process to start prioritizing, how do we go about taking all of this information and putting it into an accessibility plan. I'm just scrolling through this so that you know that it's there. And we also provide resources and support, including two accessibility plan templates that we created in Excel or Google sheet format and another one in Google Doc or Word format. You can use those directly or you could use them to inspire the creation of your own accessibility plan. Again, a lot of information here and I just want to show also, this is a question we get asked a lot, at the bottom of your report, you get every single answer to all the questions. Just so you know that that's there. I'm going to very quickly show you one of the accessibility plan examples. This is the one in Google Sheet format. And it helps you to outline things like what are the issues that need to be corrected, what is the plan for improvement? Who is responsible? Is there going to be a cost? If so, roughly what is a cost? What is our funding source, priority levels, et cetera. So it'll help you to put this plan together as you move forward with your accessibility plan. With that, I'm going to go back to the slideshow. So we talked about assess and plan and now let's talk a little bit about connect. So this is where we provide a lot of resources and help for your organization to get connected with experts and with organizations and individuals that can help you with information, with training, with consulting, with any resources that you need throughout your process. So we have information about training and consulting services that Open Door Arts provides. We also are developing an expert directory. This is a national list, a vetted list of individuals and organizations that can provide consultation or access services to support your work. So for example, if you're looking for somebody to conduct an access audit of your organization or somebody to provide staff training to your team or to just consult around the installation of an assistive listening system, the expert directories will have that information kind of categorized and you'll be able to connect with those individuals who have chosen to be added to this directory. So we're really excited about that. Also, we want you to connect to your cultural community. So we know that there's so much amazing work that happens from connecting with your peers and learning from their experience and seeing what has been helpful to them. So we will be curating opportunities for shared learning, for learning communities, and for just for peer organizations to come together and learn from and with each other. Also, we're very excited to feature the artwork of about 50 disabled artists on the hub. We're very excited, they were compensated for for their work. And we are also in the process of developing a disabled artist and creative roster on the hub so that organizations can find artists and creatives with disabilities and connect with them for work opportunities, for promoting their work. So we're very excited about that aspect as well. Now we'll get into the learn part of this process. And on the hub a lot of the magic happens in the learn section. The biggest part of content, the kind of more exciting part of the hub is what we're calling hub topic pages. There's about 50 individual web pages and I will show you in a minute what they look like that we have created with a group of about 35 consultants from around the country who are the leading experts in each of these accessibility areas that provide you with really detailed information around implementing practices. They provide legal information. They provide connections to external resources so that you can learn more. They provide connections to experts, key terms. They're incredibly thorough and there's about 50 of them. So any, pretty much any topic you could think of that you would be interested in learning about, about this. And I will show you again what those look like. So again, that's where a lot of the, the bulk of learning of the hub lives, as I mentioned earlier with the self-assessment, we have this glossary. The glossary is extending into the hub. So we have definitions now of about 150 access terms that will be linked in each of these 50 pages and also as a standalone resource, I will show you what that looks like. And also Portia mentioned earlier we are working on a series of asynchronous training modules that will live on the hub. They can be taken, because they're asynchronous, you can take them at any point and we will be structuring them so that upon completion folks can get a certification to show that they have engaged in this learning and and that they're part of essentially a certified access workforce. Which, we wanted to make sure that this work was organizational and also personal, right? So that we can support the practices of organizations and also increase the learning and the skill building of individuals who are working in those organizations and who might be moving from one organization to another throughout their journey and their work. So with that I'm going to screen share and show you the hub. So I want to give the caveat that this website is under construction. So what you see here might look a little bit different once the hub is launched to the public. I'm going to show you the topics page, which is what I was describing earlier, which are these 50 plus pages of content. And again these are organized in the same way that the self-assessment content was organized. So we have access essentials, accessible spaces, access services, communication and programming. And in each of these you're going to find somewhere between 10 and 15 or so pages of content. So I'm going to show you the spaces category page where you will get a little bit of video and some information about what we mean by accessible spaces. And then we have a list of all of the content pages within the spaces section. So as examples we have care and convenience features, gardens and outdoor spaces, historic spaces, galleries, collections and exhibits, et cetera. So these are all considerations for accessibility within the physical environments of your organization and navigating those environments. We have office and staff spaces so it's not only patron facing but also internal accessibility and then physical features, sensory features, et cetera. So I'm going to show you as an example of the signage and way finding page within the spaces section so that you can see what each of these pages will look like. So now we're in the signage and way finding page. You'll see first who the content creators and editors are. So here we have Bill Green and Dani Rose. On the right side of every single page we have artwork by disabled artists, in this case Judith Klausner. And we're really excited that you get to connect with the artists directly. So we have linked all of their names here with either their website or their social media. So that if you want to learn more about their work or you want to promote their work or work with them and hire them, you can do so. Every single page, and every single one of these 50 plus pages has artwork by a disabled artist who was paid to show their work, which we're very excited about. So now I'm going to show you what each of these pages looks like. So first we have a general overview. So in this case the page is signage and way finding. So we'll tell you what we mean by signage and way finding, what are the accessibility considerations around signage and way finding? So that's a quick general overview. Then we have a section to the right of that called key terms and this is what links to that glossary that I was referring to. So for example, within signage and way finding, you might be interested in learning about universal design or access symbols. So you might click on access symbols and then you will see that the glossary term, that key term pops up and you get a definition of what we mean by access symbols, other pages of the hub that connect to access symbols and then external resources that might be helpful to you. You could also at the bottom click on view all glossary terms and that takes you to a page that has every single one of those 150 plus glossary terms. So then we move into the fun part, which is the implementation section. And this is where you're going to get really detailed information around how do we now implement these practices? How do we make sure that our signage and wayfinding are accessible? And so we have these collapsible menus where we give you more information so that you can put this into practice at your organization. So with that I will move on to the next section in all of these pages, which is associated legal requirements or obligations. This is something that again we got a lot of requests for, which is really understanding your legal responsibilities. So what we did here is we created information that is specific to this topic. So in this case we're in the signage and way finding page. So we are going to tell you what the requirements under the ADA are relating to signage and way finding. So for example here, we tell you under the 2010 standards or under title two of the ADA, under title three of the ADA, these are the requirements. Same with the Rehab act and same with ABA, if it's applicable, the Architectural Barriers Act, There are also some additional legal resources that might be helpful in your learning process. But again these are specific to the topic on this page so that you know directly and you don't have to go and find it yourself. And this was, I have to say this was created with legal experts in accessibility. So really vetted resources. Next we have a learn more section, which is where you get external resources that help you learn more. So in this case there's a video about science, disability access, symbols, et cetera. So we have all a lot of different kinds of resources that can help you learn further. And then lastly we have a link to that expert directory which is not built yet but it will be built soon. And this is an example where you will click on Betty and you will learn about Betty's background and it'll tell you how Betty can support you specifically related to wayfinding and signage. So that is a little sneak peek at one of the access hub pages and again there's about 50 of these. So we're very excited about all of the wonderful learning that will happen as a result of that. With that I will now move into implement where this is where we, you know, we hope that after you've engaged with all of this information and resources and experts and everything that is in the hub, your organization will be better positioned to improve your policies, your practices, your programs, your services, your communications, that you will be better able to understand and fulfill your legal responsibilities, and also to go way beyond, we know that legal responsibilities are the floor, not the ceiling. And so that you understand them so that you can you can make sure that compliance is in place but that you can go way beyond and that you can better and more effectively connect with the disability community, that you can gain support and connection to your network and community, so that you can really feel like you're part of something bigger and that you can learn from from others. And that also that you can become part of a certified workforce of national access professionals. So we again, as I was saying earlier, we want this work to be done at the organizational level and we also want this work to be done at the personal level. So we hope that these are all of the things that happen for you to be able to implement, right? That you've learned all of these things, that you have gained knowledge, understanding so that you can put all of these things in place. So with that I am very excited to introduce our colleague Sarah Lynn Kilpatrick who has been a partner throughout this work. Sarah Lynn led her previous team at Celebrity Series through the process of completing the self-assessment is now in a new role that she will tell you about but has been wonderfully thoughtful about the process that her organization has gone through. So I'm excited to introduce Sarah Lynn so that she can tell us a little bit more about what this process and journey has been like to them.

Sarah Lynn Kilpatrick: Hello, my name is Sarah Lynn. Can everyone hear me? Just making sure. Beautiful. Excellent. So I am coming to you today from the Community Music Center of Boston, which is where I am now the director of student enrollment and experience. The bulk of my experience with the self-assessment was when I was at Celebrity Series and I was their assistant manager of patron services and their accessibility coordinator. So of the circle I'm going to kind of talk about assessing and planning at Celebrity Series and then some plan, future things at Community Music Center of Boston. So at Celebrity Series I was the accessibility coordinator and I also was chairing the staff accessibility committee. And so I was responsible for kind of administering the self-assessment. The way that we decided to go about it was we put the self-assessment in a spreadsheet so that everybody in the organization could access it and I filled out each section to the best of my knowledge and then went to relevant members and departments and things like that. So for example, we did do part two a little bit differently. So for parts 1, 3, 4 and five, I filled it out to the best of my ability and then sent to the relevant accessibility committee members that best corresponded. For example, for part one organizational approach, I worked with the associate director of finance and administration to fill that section out. And then for the part four, communications, I worked with our associate director of communications to fill that out. So once we had a good sense of what our responses were, I had two staff members at Celebrity Series who were not on the accessibility committee review. So they had a little bit less context but were just more of maybe an unbiased opinion on what the responses we had were. And then after that we met as a group reviewed all responses and submitted. So I should have led with this, Celebrity Series of Boston is a multidisciplinary nonprofit performing arts presenter. And so we had a unique situation that made it so we needed to think creatively about how to use the self-assessment to meet our needs because we don't own our own performing facility. We have an office space that we work in and then we present performances all around the city of Boston and the greater Boston area. What we decided to do for the spaces part was a little bit different and was something that we decided to do after working with the wonderful Nicole and Portia who have been incredible along the way, filling out the self-assessment, any questions that we've had on what questions mean or any clarifying questions, they've been super helpful. What we did for part two, which is the space section, is we actually filled that out multiple times. So we filled it out once for our office space and answered all of those questions. And then for, we have about 20 venues in or over 20 venues in the greater Boston area. But we picked a selection, I believe we ended up with like five total venues and so we worked with our partners at the venues, whether they were in the box office or a facilities team, kind of depended on the venue and we filled those sections out and submitted them more than once. So that's one of the great things about the self-assessment, that it's super flexible and you can use it in a very customized way to work for your organization to get the customized results that you need to make improvements. So that was kind of my experience at the Celebrity Series of Boston. I'm happy to answer any other questions. Once we submitted the assessment, we got the results back right away and what I did was I wrote an executive summary and sent that off to our executive director who reviewed it before sharing it with a team. However, now I'm at Community Music Center Boston, so I don't quite know exactly what they're doing to implement and do the access plan and all of that. I know that the hub is going to be super helpful in being able to do that. I know for sure a big project at Celebrity Series was making sure all of our venues had assisted listening devices for patrons. And so I know that as soon as that hub is launched that will be an important topic that they're going to go to the hub for to see if they can figure that out sort of thing. So that was kind of the Celebrity Series of Boston side. For the Community Music Center side, I have been here for almost a month now, which is flown by. I do a lot of registration and enrollment things and I've spoken to the team who filled out the self-assessment for CMCB last year. So our chief advancement officer here and the director of community engagement programs are the ones who filled out the self-assessment at Community Music Center. This is a community music school that provides instruction for students of all ages. We have kids as little as two or three and then we have students in their nineties, so a very different kind of organization. We do have our own building. And so between those two staff members, they filled out the self-assessment, submitted it, and now I have joined this team as they're in kind of the planning and connecting and learning phase. We have a location in South Boston right now which has some accessibility challenges, just, it's an old building, it's Boston, it's a pretty typical experience. And what we as an organization have done is we have purchased a new building in Roxbury in the new Nubian square and right now that is under construction. And so we are working to outfit this space to meet Community Music Centers' needs and the self-assessment is really guiding decisions rooted in accessibility. So most of the access plan has to do with the new building and the work that we're doing there. And what's been really useful about the self-assessment is it gives us a guide to kind of look at and center accessibility from the very beginning of us entering this building space. So I know it's been super useful, I'm excited. You know the thing that I think CMCB will use a lot for the hub is the space resources, lots of different, what does cane detectable tables look like? What does, what are the floor requirements? What are the stair requirements, physical space, stuff like that. Door tension, things like that. So that's kind of my, my testimonial. A little bit all over the place. If you have any questions though, I'm happy to answer them and I just have to say nothing but lovely experiences with Open Door Arts. I think everybody should take the self-assessment. I think everyone's going to have a great use for the hub and I'm really excited to see what they do next.

Nicole: Thanks Sarah Lynn.

Portia: That's a great tee up. And Sarah Lynn will be around during the A and A, so if you have more organizational specific questions about her experience, you can tune in for those or you can ask Nicole and I questions as well. But just wanted to end by reiterating this idea that we do sort of feel like there's this opportunity here for all of us to be part of collective action and that us as individuals can improve our access knowledge and then as a result our organizations who participate and engage with the hub can change their practices and really if we can all commit to doing this work even in difficult circumstances that we know that we can create sectorwide and nationwide change where people with disabilities are more equitably represented, included, welcomed and engaged in the arts and culture sector, which is why we're all here and which is really the goal of all of the tools that we've shared today and all of the work that we've been doing. So with that, we'd love to open it up for some questions. I know we have had some in the Q and A already and we can continue to take questions there and we can also read them out.

Nicole: And I'll just, this is Nicole, I'll just voice that in the Q and A in the chat there was a question about whether the videos in each of the sections of the self-assessment had ASL and captions and the answer is yes, they have spoken English ASL and captions. All of them. And the same is true for the hub. There are some videos in each of those five sections on the hub and that's the case for those as well. I know Dani, you were monitoring the chat, I'm not sure if there were any other questions that had come in earlier.

Ann: It looks like there are a couple of questions in the Q and A section.

Nicole: Okay, great. So I'm going to voice these. The first question from Regina is for the artist directory in the hub, will these be artists based in New England or in all of the United States? And the answer, I know Dani has been answering some of those, and the answer is throughout the United States. The artists that are right now represented in the Hub when I was doing the screen share at the top of each of those content pages are from all over the United States. And so we, we are hoping to continue to do that with the directory as well. The second question is on the hub, is there going to be a directory of venues that highlights the accessibility of their infrastructure? This would be helpful as we search for locations for performances. That is a beautiful suggestion that had not received enough attention from our team. So thank you for sharing that. One thing that we, and I know I unde- that this is a Massachusetts space resource, but we have been partnering with the folks at Arts Boston who have just created a beautiful accessibility filter for their calendar. And that has a lot of really helpful information for organizations to be able to share that information with the public but also for them to be able to communicate about it clearly. So thinking about what that might look like at a national scale for the Hub is, is an interesting challenge. So thank you for asking that.

Dani: This is Dani. There were a couple of questions in the Q and A earlier that I just wanted to share out with the group. One of them was can you download the questionnaire before taking it? And absolutely there's going to be a PDF with all of the questions in each section as you go through. And then the other question was for the space section, if you don't own your space, is that still relevant? Yes, you can absolutely fill it out with the context of renting space or when you're looking for rental spaces and also as Sarah Lynn shared, you can take the assessment more than one time. So you can definitely fill out just the space section for any relevant spaces that you might work with or any relevant context. I'll also note that there's a notes section there in the self-assessment. So anything that you want to put in context, we'll carry over into your report by putting it in that note section. So just a couple of ways to use that tool. Passing it back off to you Nicole.

Nicole: Awesome, thank you so much Dani. I see also a question in the Q and A from Louisa. I seeing some wonderful consultants here to help us figure out what are the next stages of the hub. This is the question: will the hub have a directory of potential grants for funding accessibility? The answer is - wouldn't that be lovely? And I think that you are both Amy and Louisa like really, really speaking so profoundly about the opportunities and the possibilities of this resource and, and also our need as an organization to hear from the community about what is most needed. We know that when we did the research that Portia referred to earlier, that 'Towards a Culture of Access' reports, the biggest barrier that organizations reported was funding across the board. What can we do as a collective resource to make sure that we are supporting organizations both to create internal infrastructures to budget for accessibility, but also to start working with the funding community to really start prioritizing this in the way that it deserves to be prioritized and to make that information more available. So the answer is it doesn't exist now and we have a lot of hopes for the future of the hub really expanding way beyond what's already in there.

Portia: This is Portia. I'm just going to also jump in to say while we know that that is a barrier experienced and one that is definitely a perceived barrier a lot, one of the other biggest pieces of feedback we've gotten from organizations who have completed the self-assessment and who are starting their planning is how surprised they are at how many action items they can take on and complete that do not cost a cent. And so I think that's where the self-assessment can also be so eye-opening to realize how many things you can do to improve your accessibility and make really meaningful change that do not require a capital campaign. So just another sort of side of that as well.

Nicole: And I just want to, this is Nicole again. I just want to voice that our friend Nate Shu from Arts Boston has generously shared both the link to the Arts Boston calendar and also to their email address. If you want to connect, if you are a Massachusetts based organization and this is new to you, please connect with Nate because this is an incredible resource and an incredible service to the cultural community and to the disability community to make sure that all of that information is in one place, very much in line with what we're trying to do with the hub, to make sure that the information is as easy as possible to find in one place. So cannot say enough about that calendar and would love to see calendars like that pop up everywhere.

Sarah Lynn: I can vouch for the usefulness of the calendar as well. I did at Celebrity Series, use the Arts Boston calendar to post all of our events and we used the new accessibility functions and it's super user friendly. And Nate was also great if we had any specific questions, especially about if you're renting a venue or don't own your own venue. So I can testify to that as well.

Ann: This is great. I don't see any other questions and it looks like some people having to, you know, move on to their next meetings and everything. I'm so grateful for your time, Nicole and Portia and Dani and Sarah Lynn, thank you for sharing your experience. I wanted everyone to know that we will be posting this recording on NEFA's blog and across our channels. We hope to see you again and please continue this work and stay connected with us. Enjoy the rest of your day.