Making your event easy to use (film festival screenings in particular)

Pic credit: Dean Leggett

I help run a free film festival in Greenwich (specifically the Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival) and every year when preparing the listings I try and keep the following things in mind. My aim is to make it easy for people to know what to expect at our screenings and either reduce or at least draw attention to any barriers.

1. Subtitles / captions

If a film screening can be subtitled then that helps to include people who are d/Deaf or who have a degree of hearing loss or audio processing difficulties. Those difficulties can also be exacerbated by the acoustics of the venue. 

Even people with good or perfectly adequate hearing (me!) can pick up extra stuff they'd not even realised they'd missed. For me it helps solidify how place or character names are spelled which generally helps me remember and know what's going on. 

Subtitles do exclude people who find them a visual distraction though. They also tend to appear on-screen just before the character speaks them, so can ruin the joke or flow a bit. 

It's fine to have no subtitles but the most important thing is to state whether a film will have them or not. Just let people know.

Also if you are subtitling a film that gives you access to another advertising venue: http://yourlocalcinema.com/

In my own listings I've used the "Regional Indicator Symbol Letter S" to denote subtitled events 🇸

2. ♿️ Wheelchair accessibility: venue and loos

A venue may be wheelchair accessible but if the screening room is upstairs and there's no lift... not so much. If possible visit the venue yourself and see but if you are able-bodied you may miss some subtle things that seem fine but which might be a barrier or annoyance to someone using a wheelchair. A good website to check a venue's accessibility is https://www.accessable.co.uk/ - with information gathered by people who've visited a site and know what to look out for.

For a film screening many people can manage the couple of hours duration without needing a loo, but others will need to know the loo situation, particularly if coming from work or elsewhere. It's a helpful kindness to say in your advertising blurb if there is only a standard loo or if it's accessible. Emojis are a quick shorthand but do also write it out for users of screenreaders.

♿️ 🚽 ❌
   
♿️ 🚽 ✅

3. Different exits?

This one is my pet peeve and I've been to two events which caused me a bit of stress on leaving as I'd not been aware before the screening that we'd all be leaving a park by a different gate from the ones we'd come in by. 

Open air park screenings are fantastic but parks often close during the screening and everyone is shuttled through a single exit. This can be a bit of an unpleasant surprise. Sometimes there's a financial cost too, e.g. I can walk into the top of Greenwich Park and walk home from the same gate, but if we're all leaving by Cutty Sark at the bottom that's a bus ride home or a longer walk up a steep hill. Fine, but helpful to be able to plan for this (particularly, I would assume, for people using wheelchairs). 

Also for me personally, having no sense of direction I prefer to know exactly where I'm heading for on leaving and can't necessarily guarantee a good signal to get that info from the CityMapper app!

 

4. What3Words location markers

These are super helpful for outdoor events where people might need to know the location of any preferred (nearest, or where the ticket-checkers are) entrance, the exit and the actual screening area if a walk is involved. Adding a link to the Google Maps map is also very helpful as people can zoom in and see what the nearest bus stops are, plus other transport options or nearest car park.

This one will give you a nice view of the row of cherry trees in April: stay.path.wizard

The printed word and http://

When I'm looking at a page of printed text I find it a bit hard to spot the web addresses embedded within it unless they are in colour or underlined. Web addresses written with www. at the beginning, instead of http://, just seem unfinished to me, and perhaps less easy to spot. An http:// or two is helpful to guide the eye, being the textual equivalent of a highlighter pen. A sensible alternative would be to put the web address at the end of the text and reference it in-text, and if it's a long address it's helpful to provide a shorter alternative to save whoever's typing it in from the printed page.

Some accessibility guidelines recommend against underlining text (presumably because the line interferes with the shape of the words but since we've managed to invent strikethrough and double strikethrough surely we can invent an underline that's lower down...) or italicising words, meaning that the links aren't made particularly salient. Sometimes links are presented in bold, which is a big help, but it depends on the house style.

This is when I skim read in hope of finding http:// as this 'word' looks different from all the other text on the page. It's probably the :// that's doing it but the h and the p form a nice shape too. Probably we've all got used to the idea that typing http:// into a browser address bar is generally redundant as the default setting is for web pages (although you have to be careful if you want to use the https:// format for secure pages).

In electronic documents internet addresses are usually more obvious. Pressing the space bar after typing one in my email programme (Outlook) or Word automatically turns the preceding address into a link or email address (of course you can set it so that it doesn't do this). In some email programmes the mailto: command isn't needed and the presence of an @ is enough to create a clickable email address, similarly the http:// isn't necessary and www.blah will resolve to an active link.

Plenty of web addresses don't even need the www, for example bit.ly and twitter.com. Having said that I notice that the http:// seems still to be required in tweets in order to render an address as a blue-text active link (similarly # in front of a word renders it as a link to the Twitter search results for that word).

Presumably someone can 'set' Twitter so that bit.ly/blah will go to http://bit.ly/blah in the way that someone must have done something to email a few years ago so that mailto: in front of an address would 'activate' it. But at least in these cases it's obvious what the link is, whatever it looks like.

But for printed pages, bring back the http://

With thanks to @the_beacon for the point about https and to @jjsanderson, @mokuska and @rpg7twit for disagreeing with me :)