The Marketplace and I: Accessibility Training Workshops
What we offer
The Marketplace and I: Accessibility Training will provide your company/ organisation with greater accessibility awareness and help you to work through accessibility focused tasks. We will support your company to reconsider what accessibility could be like and develop an accessible strategy in the short, medium, and long term.
Accessible Training
Innovative, art-based accessibility training sessions with your employees.
Accessible Audits
Outlining and advising on areas across your company premises where physical and intangible amends can be implemented to improve accessibility easily and cost-effectively.
Accessible Planning
Help with building/ revising your accessible plan.
Accessible Information
Advice and support with how best to communicate accessible information and services to your customers.
The workshops are free
These workshops are completely free and can be tailored to suit your company/ organisation’s needs.
The training will involve:
Why should my company focus on accessibility?
Accounting for 15% of the population and equating to almost 1 billion people, persons living with disabilities are part of the largest minority group (WHO, 2021).
In the UK, the disposable income of disabled persons currently equates to £274billion and is set to rise by 14% annually due to our ageing demographic and health repercussions from Covid-19 (Purple, 2022).
It was uncovered that in 2019, the UK economy missed out on £2billion monthly by failing to cater to disabled demographics, tallying monthly losses of approximately £163 million for restaurants, pubs, and clubs; £267 million for high-street shops; and £501 million for supermarkets (Purple, 2022).
Despite their commercial value, disabled persons are often perceived by companies as unprofitable and thus are neglected from company strategies, communications, and market research.
Testimonial: The Gregson
“The Marketplace and I accessibility training was eye opening. It made our diverse team of staff, volunteers and trustees think about accessibility in alternative ways.
Leighanne helped us see some of the simple improvements we could make within our charity to make our building more accessible. These things don't cost the earth but make a huge difference and being an accessible building is so important to us.
We have used the training as the foundation of our new accessibility strategy that is being informed by the excellent training, we received with Leighanne.
Long term this will help us to unlock funding to make important changes in our building and most importantly ensure that the building is more inviting and welcoming for everyone in our community”.
Charles Tyrer, CEO at The Gregson.
Testimonial: Lancaster Grand Theatre
“Lancaster Grand Theatre have been working in partnership with Dr Leighanne Higgins and colleagues to review our theatres current accessibility provision.
From the initial meeting to the delivery of their Accessibility workshop, working with The Marketplace & I has been invaluable to our organisation.
The input from The Marketplace & I has helped us to work towards a strategy to improve our accessibility provision whilst updating knowledge on current accessibility procedure for all our staff and volunteers.
We look forward to continuing our partnership into the future as we work towards finding solutions and providing a greater level of accessibility within the theatre for our community”.
Kerry Tenbey, Marketing and Design and Duty Manager at Lancaster Grand Theatre.
Get in touch
For more information or to book a workshop today contact:
Leighanne Higgins: l.higgins@lancaster.ac.uk
Killian O’Leary: k.oleary1@lancaster.ac.uk