Our Accessibility Journey

When we started training we took the standard approach and created courses that benefitted a majority of people. They were delivered by able bodied trainers who spoke English. But we then started to discuss a new idea with one of our trainers who is deaf and communicated in British Sign Language (BSL). What we discovered was that all courses we could find that were aimed at deaf people were delivered by a speaking and hearing trainer with a BSL interpreter in the corner. This seemed a little wrong to us, so we started to explore options with courses being led in BSL.

The first trial was a taster course in Norwich we the Directors (Meg and John) joined Tsena (our BSL trainer) at a deaf social event where Tsena delivered a short session in resuscitation and recovery position. The first thing we noticed was how difficult it was for us to communicate. We were 2 hearing people in a room of deaf people and we really struggled to communicate with anyone. The stark realisation that this is what it is like for deaf people on a daily basis hit really hard and we decided there and then that we could do things better.

So we started to develop a BSL version of the course. Following a short discussion we set a BSL standard for the trainer, level 6 BSL. This allows the trainer to communicate like a native and adapt to any subtle differences between spoken English and BSL. We had to adjust some wording on some of the slides. We also altered some of the activities to make them easier for people to communicate with their hands while completing tasks. Finally we were ready to trial the new product. Sign Health, a charity providing care for deaf people, were the first test subjects. They had a few hearing people on the course and in an interesting turn of events we had BSL interpreters present to translate it for the hearing people.

The next steps - visually impaired

Once we achieved this milestone, we started on the next stage. What could we do for the visually impaired. For this we turned to the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) to get some advice. Initially we were looking at specialist courses for blind people. The RNIB advised that, as a large numbers of people don't register as blind or partially sighted, we should alter our courses so that anybody, whether registered or not, could access them. This meant setting up a way of sharing the slides prior to the training so people could review before hand. It meant that making sure our website was designed with descriptions for pictures. This is still a work in progress, but we are getting there. And as always, we are aiming for better.