Accessible tourism - Margo Carwardine (part 2)

Speaker 00:07 (PROGRAM THEME)

It's up to you and me to shine a guiding light and lead the way. United by our cause we have power to pursue what we believe. We'll achieve the realisation of our dreams... 

Speaker 1 00:25

Hello there, welcome to this week's episode of New Horizons. Thanks for your company, I'm Vaughan Bennison. Just before we get into the second part of our presentation on accessible tourism and that really interesting project run by the Queensland Braille Writing Association, let me tell you that on Thursday the 3rd of October at 19 .30 hours or 7.30pm we'll be having a BCA conversation about New Horizons. We'll be talking about the history of New Horizons, its background etc. and what it means to the community. And we're seeking your views on what you'd like to hear more about, what sort of a style of program you think New Horizons should be and where we should be putting our attentions.

You might recall that we have been working on establishing a New Horizons team and that work now is well underway. And you'll hear more about that in that session on the 3rd of October at half past 7 in the evening. If you'd like to register for that BCA conversation check out the member update that comes out this week and there'll be a reminder next week as well. So that's essentially two weeks from this week. 

And now here's the second part of the presentation given to the roundtable on information access for people with a print disability. This presentation was given by Margo Carwadine, and you might recall it's about accessible tourism and ways that venues can make themselves more accessible. A slight recap from last week.

Speaker 2 01:55

While the pandemic was raging, people at Braille House had a conversation about that, particularly with one of our transcribers who is blind, and how does she access the QR codes, particularly when in Queensland we went hard, a bit like Western Australia, it was mandatory check-in for most places. So Braille House developed tactile QR code indicators that are like on contact that can be stuck on top of the QR code so that people who are blind or low vision can feel within the text box and know where the QR code indicator is.
They come in two sizes, so simple but so powerful, and we do sell these by the way, they won a national award, a national disability award, and we were up against some amazing things in that category, so things don't have to be complicated to make a difference.

I apologise because our website's quite woeful at the moment, but if you log in in the middle of July it's going to be so good, but you can find them available on there, and all the material that I'm sharing with you will be freely available for everyone to use to share with destinations like worldwide to promote an inclusive environment and destinations.

So moving then to the hospitality section audit, it's the smallest one actually, it only has five categories, and the tourism or event destination audit has 11 categories each with subtotals. So it was really important that we trialled our materials, so I went door knocking, we developed a wonderful relationship with the Queensland Hotels Association, and we have been working with four different venues who trialled the audit tools and gave us feedback which led to a little bit of refinement, and then they also provided us with information on their facilities very generously because these case studies will also be published as part of the project. So the accommodation venue is the Shangri-La in Cairns.

04:28

The hospitality venue is Marumba Downs Tavern, which is north of Brisbane, and we have two tourism and event destinations. One is a place that if you visited Brisbane, particularly for any kind of event you've probably been to, which is the Suncorp Stadium. So good to have a big player in the space, and the final one is the Mount Isa tourism destination centre in Mount Isa that has several different tours and projects and a coffee shop and whatnot. So we made sure that we went across the state, different providers from big to small to get the feedback.

So one of the things we really want to encourage businesses to do after they've undertaken their case study is actually look at their business planning. Now a business plan can look very different for all sorts of reasons, particularly related to the type of business and to the type of destination. So that the approach that I've taken to this is I've had a look at a number of the categories that a business plan may include, and it's in these categories that businesses may make mention of steps forward. So it may be through example, through their mission or vision statement they want to speak about their focus on access and inclusion. It might be operations or key people, it might be how they target their market, it might be communication and marketing, risk management, legislation implications, the goals that they have for medium or short term or perhaps finances.

Now in stepping back from that I'd like to share with you a wonderful initiative that Marama Downs Tavern, one of our case studies and I have been liaising about. So the delightful Melinda who's the manager of, we'll call it a pub, but it's a tavern. With each of our case studies we've actually offered them training for their staff incited guided and they've latched that up, they're really quite excited about that. So the Marama Downs Tavern is having their training at the end of this month and Melinda reached out to me and said, what do you think? I'd like to host a special kind of event. Anyway, it's turning into a little bit of a launch event for the project. 

And she said, I'd actually like to have an event where we invite anyone and everyone to come, but we particularly let people in the blind and low vision community know about it.
And for those people, we might even be able to offer them a little bit of a discount, but I'd like them to come along and enjoy themselves and give us feedback. We would love after our staff have done the training to know how we're tracking and how we can improve.
We'd really like to know as a destination venue what else we can do beyond staff and with our facilities. 

I was almost doing Mickey flips around my office when that email came through. How good is that? Isn't that what we want people to be able to do to have a really good look at their facilities, to think about the questions and where they need to go and then say, okay, let's get really real about this and enter into that space. So yeah, I'm beyond excited about that one. So the kinds of resources that we're offering in the toolkit are templates and tools that will support businesses move forward. I've developed a key glossary of terms, not just around blindness and low vision, but there are a few technical terms in the self -assessment audit checklists so people will easily be able to refer to those.

08:18

There are the links and imagery for how to meet a person with low vision loss as in etiquette and tips. There's a guide to how to guide a person with low vision. There are photographic examples provided by the four case studies around supportive design elements in their facilities and unsupportive design elements in their facilities. There's also sample scripts that I mentioned how you take a booking, how you greet someone when they turn up to your facility and also helpful tips when you're assessing resources and materials when stepping into that space.

Now to give you a little bit of an example, one of the things that I developed for when we went to a conference in Cairns last year was a dummy guide of Welcome to Hotel Q. Now this could be provided to a blind or low vision visitor. It is in large print and Braille and it has a tactile QR code indicator on the front that when you hold your phone over it, it takes it through so that this document, which is six pages in large print, is actually available in voice. 

It talks about the dedication of the facility to making people feel safe and welcome. It explains their room number and how to get to their room from where they are standing, where their room is in relation to where they get out of the lift, what floor it's on, emergency evacuation procedures, how the key function works, the bathrooms immediately to your right as you go in the door, the shampoo is here, like those kind of things that just describe the room. I'm welcome to share any of these if people would like to have a look at them. So they're the sorts of resources that will become available. And the last, very quickly because I am watching the clock, very mindful of supporting businesses to communicate and market their facility.

And research indicates that many visitors with accessibility requirements actually start their journey online with a good deal of research and planning across multiple platforms before they actually even booked their trip. So it's really important then that businesses understand that their websites and their digital resources need to be accessible and need to be marketed well. And I was really grateful for the session that we went to yesterday that spoke about that level of accessibility.

So these are the sorts of things that will be provided in the marketing and communication element of the project. We'll have sample personal stories of travellers or visitors who are blind or low vision because many facilities actually haven't welcomed someone to their facility and know their personal story. There'll be a sample media release for businesses to adapt from to highlight their destination's practical application of accessibility, their sample social posts, sample hashtags, sample photo frames, sample stickers, and information on how to post or tutorials on posting. And the final section is about referencing. It's very well referenced. So if you're looking to follow up any of the information within the project, it will be available. 

Speaker 1

And once again, a big thank you to the roundtable on information access for people with a print disability for allowing us the use of this material. If there's a story or an idea that you have for New Horizons, get in touch...

11:59

new.horizons@bca.org.au is the address - New dot Hhorizons at BCA dot org dot AU. If you'd like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia more generally, you can call 1-800-033-660 ...1800-033-660. Or you can email, bca@bca.org.au - BCA at BCA dot org dot AU. I'm Vaughan Bennison. I'll talk to you again next week.