Overview
Accessibility, diversity and inclusion are core values of the Festival at all levels of our organisation, and we are committed to delivering a programme that is representative of the whole city and can be enjoyed by everyone. At the same time, we recognise that there are still significant barriers for groups in our society to be able to enjoy and participate in festival activity.
Each year we work with to break down institutional barriers and welcome everyone into the conversation around our city, expanding the concept of ‘architecture’ through discovery, debate, learning and activism. Every year, we work to bring new voices into conversations around architecture, who may not have had the opportunity or confidence to do before, platform emerging artists and designers and create a programme that spans across both the physical and the digital, ensuring there is something for everyone.
We aim to practically reduce barriers to participation in the festival also, where possible, whether that be organising or attending events.
Events: Organisers
If you’re running an event as part of LFA2023, it’s worth thinking about what factors might restrict someone’s ability to participate. It’s important to explore questions around access at the outset, when you first start to devise a project, rather than being left as a last minute add it. You can find our guide on how to make your event more inclusive in the LFA Account Section.
Events: Attendees
If you’re attending an event, you can find general site and event access information on every event listing, such as accessible toilets, BSL interpreted events etc. You can also search the programme using this information. If you need additional assistance for an event, you can find the specific contact for each event on the event listing itself. You can also find this information in our printed guide and alternative versions of the guide (such as LFA2023 Easy Read Guide downloadable using this link).
On each events you may find the following icons, below you can find out what each icon refers to. If there is anything you would like to make sure is on the list, and would make the festival more accessible to you, let us know by emailing eliza.grosvenor@nla.london, or by giving us a call on 020 7636 4044.
Content (digital)
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to non-compliances including those listed below:
- Some older images and video do not have alt text – We aim to provide alt text to all images that convey information to users, and although we encourage contributors to describe their content, some user-generated content might not have alt text. As there are thousands of images in our image library and no technical way to filter those that don’t have alt text, we consider it a disproportionate burden at this time to check every single past image for alt text.
- Some older videos do not have captions – We aim to provide captions to all new non text content, and encourage the same for our event organisers. Where possible we have added captions, however it is not possible to do so for some of the older videos.
- PDF documents – We are aware that many past documents were only available in a PDF format. It would be a disproportionate burden for the organisation to go back and review all the Word and PDF documents published on the site to ensure they were accessible. However, we make the commitment to ensure that any new PDFs or Word documents published from that date, and into the future, will meet accessibility standards.
Reflections and Next steps
At LFA, we acknowledge that there is much more that needs to be done and are constantly reflecting and working on ways we can improve.
We have assessed the process for making our website, programmes and content accessible, however the website hosts dozens pieces of content from before these assessments which cannot be guaranteed to meet the correct standards. We are constantly working to improve this however we have to understand that that the impact of fully meeting the requirements is too much for the organisation to manage at this stage. We appreciate your understanding on this, but also welcome your challenge and feedback.
If you find any problems that aren’t listed above or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, get in touch. We aim to get back to you with 7 days.
Additionally, if there is anything that would help your experience of the festival, whether that be on the website, our guide, or the events themselves, you can send an email to eliza.grosvenor@nla.london or give us a call on 020 7636 4044.
Finally, alternative formats of the most of our resources, website content and guide are available on request (Such as Easy Read or Audio Described versions). Please ask us for this information in alternative formats by dropping an email or giving a call.
