5. Do this instead: Build your knowledge, skills, and accountability

Not knowing where to start can be one of the biggest barriers to taking action (see section 1).  The sections ‘Don’t do this’ and ‘Do this Instead’ are designed to help you get started and to outline many of the concerns that hold people back from taking action.

It is essential to build a solid understanding of what access can be now and what you can implement to truly create a more accessible environment.  Improving accessibility in exhibitions begins with expanding and deepening sector knowledge. By examining what you do, and who you do it for, you will find ways to work that are achievable.

It is also essential to understand that you cannot make any environment or experience fully accessible.  You may find a baseline of practice but you will never be able to make things accessible to all people at all times.  What you can do is establish practice for yourself and your context that will create a solid foundation for the access you will provide, its rationale and its implementation.

Improving accessibility in exhibitions begins with expanding and deepening sector knowledge. Many organisations still operate from partial or outdated understandings of what access involves, relying on minimal compliance rather than informed, creative practice. Developing literacy around disabled experiences, inclusive design principles, and current standards is essential but this learning must be continuous, contextual, and rooted in real-world practice rather than abstract guidelines. The following are some key things to consider and remember when building your knowledge.

Understand the limits of standards

Organisations sometimes assume that following a standard ensures accessibility for all, when in reality standards offer minimum baselines rather than comprehensive solutions. While some existing standards and guidelines are useful reference points, they should not be interpreted as definitive or exhaustive lists. See Section 4.               

Know there are many right ways to do things

A more effective approach involves using standards as starting points while actively seeking input from disabled visitors and practitioners to tailor solutions to specific contexts.  Build a range of resources that you can draw from and add to. You could start with the further resources in Section 9, but remember that you will need to adapt them to your context and the disabled people you work with.

Review your knowledge sources

• When were your current access guidelines written?
• Who wrote them?
• Were disabled people involved?
• Do they reflect digital as well as physical access?
• Are they specific to exhibitions, or are they generic building standards?

Developing your skills in your role and practice as an exhibition maker will inform your knowledge base over time and allow you to improve not only your own work but the work of those around you.  The skills you need for this work can appear deceptively simple but when applied consistently they will build towards the structural impactful change we seek.

Here are some suggested skills and actions to get you started:

Start early enough

Across the sector, colleagues can treat access as a tick-box activity added late in the process, rather than a practice that should shape decision-making from the outset. Accessibility fails most often because it is introduced too late for meaningful integration. Changing practice means embedding access thinking at the earliest planning stages, involving cross-departmental collaboration, and recognising that there is rarely a single ‘right’ way to implement accessibility.

Instead of defaulting to generic templates, organisations should engage with the evolving landscape of access practice and remain open to experimentation, adaptation, and iteration.

When access is embedded:

• Visitor dwell time often increases because exhibitions offer multiple modes of engagement.
• Disabled and non-disabled visitors use captions, transcripts, and audio guides.
• Relaxed openings attract new audiences who might later return for non-relaxed sessions.
• Staff confidence grows because access is planned and part of their everyday rather than improvised.

By contrast, retrofitted access often:

• Feels disconnected from the exhibition narrative.
• Requires reactive staffing solutions.
• Leads to reputational risk when audiences encounter barriers that could have been anticipated.
• Can exclude and marginalise disabled people.

Collaborate with disabled people

Disabled people should be involved throughout the lifecycle of an exhibition: from concept development to design, delivery, and evaluation, organisations should build genuine, sustained relationships with disabled collaborators.

Establishing feedback loops – formal or informal – helps ensure that access measures are effective, relevant, and responsive. This involvement also reduces assumptions, challenges established norms, and ensures the work is grounded in lived experience rather than imposed from the outside. See section 6 for more detail on how to collaborate with disabled people.

The Community Engagement Toolkit can be used to support you to plan, deliver, and evaluate community engagement work in museums, including engagement with disabled people.

Learn and apply approaches from tested frameworks

Consider referencing the principles of Universal Design (the design of buildings, products, or environments to make them accessible to all people) as a starting framework:

• Equitable use
• Flexibility in use
• Simple and intuitive design
• Perceptible information
• Tolerance for error
• Low physical effort
• Appropriate size and space

However, Universal Design is not a finished solution – it is a mindset. It must be adapted to each exhibition’s scale, content, and audience.

Policy into action

There has been increased legislation, awareness and funding requirements tied to accessibility. While these have been positive in some contexts, there is a persistent challenge: the widening gap between what organisations say they value and what they do in practice. It is important to acknowledge that a policy is not a plan of action – while a policy can make a statement about values and intent there must be action and practical delivery to turn the policy into reality.  “Our exhibition is accessible to everyone” or “We are an inclusive organisation” are the sort of statements that are only true if actions are taken to provide for people’s access requirements or to identify and dismantle exclusionary practices.

Access and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion policies may be ambitious, yet the resources, time, training, or commitment needed to implement them may be lacking. Recognising these gaps allows the exhibitions sector the chance to identify where change is actually needed: staffing, budgeting, project timelines, or organisational culture. Honest assessment of these gaps is an essential step toward closing them.

Promise versus reality

It is important to be honest and realistic about both the accessibility you can and cannot offer. This means that disabled people have the information they need so they know if they will face barriers or not.  Disabled people are very used to being told that something is accessible to them and then finding the reality to be something quite different – from the lift that is broken to the member of staff that does not know about the access provision being advertised to discriminatory language (intended or accidental), disabled people know that reality often does not live up to the promise.

You are more likely to gain the trust of disabled people if you are honest and transparent about what you have with regards to access and what you do not have. This demonstrates that you have thought in detail about their experiences and wish to flag where you know there are barriers (you may even be able to explain a timeline on addressing these).  No disabled person expects you to be ‘fully accessible’ because the world they experience is not and they know you operate within it.  But what they can hope for is an environment where someone has considered their experience and taken action to address it as best they can.

Here are some real-world examples.  Consider how you would build empathy and understanding around these and move towards taking action to draw your promise and your reality closer together.

Examples of common gaps:

Encourage:

• Transparent reporting.
• Publishing access limitations honestly.
• Allocating responsibility and realistic timelines for implementation.
• Tracking what changes as a result of feedback.

Honesty builds trust.