Pursuing Universal Accessibility for Everyone: The Linguistic Experience at Partition/Ensemble Conference

Abstract

Universal accessibility (or design) is a trend that promotes accessibility for everyone in various ways. One of its attributes is to ensure that everyone has equal learning opportunities, especially with the ‘access to information’ format. This applies to arranging a conference that includes conference organizers, plenary speakers, performers, conference presenters, and audio describers preparing to provide information and sensorial accessibility to the conference participants. Unfortunately for contemporary conferences, individuals with different needs are likely to experience language barriers due to their linguistic differences, hearing loss, and/or challenges in understanding and/or accessing visual information. A performing arts conference, Partition/Ensemble 2020, hosted by the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, serves as a case study for examining the process of arranging and providing language interpreters and text transcriptions, including audiovisual descriptions. During the COVID pandemic in the summer of 2020, the conference organizers decided to have a relaxed virtual conference. This designation had an impact on the preparation with four languages in different modalities: English (spoken and written), French (spoken and written), American Sign Language (signed), and Langue des signes québécoise (signed). From this linguistic learning experience, individuals who participated in this conference (e.g. conference organizers, plenary speakers, and audio describers) share their thoughts and insights for the implementation of an accessible conference (whether hosted in-person or online) with the goal of reducing language barriers. The authors of this article consider what it means to incorporate a diversity of languages simultaneously with different modalities and the challenges of accessibility with this endeavour.