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About

What’s this about?

It’s about CAPTIONED (CAP) and AUDIO DESCRIBED (AD) performances.

9 million people in the UK are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing. 2 million people have a visual impairment. So, one in six of us have a sensory impairment. That means that in a full 500-seat auditorium, there ought to be 16 people who are blind or partially sighted and 71 people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing.

Who’s missing?

To understand that, we need to know who’s currently attending and who are our potential attenders. What are they like and what motivates them? And that’s what this resource is all about.

It’s aimed at everyone who leads on or contributes to marketing and audience development initiatives, as well as access coordinators and anyone else who’s interested.

It’s about building audiences …

We’ve tried to take a sensible, practical and realistic approach to building audiences for CAP and AD performances. We want to give you useful information about audiences and lots of ideas that you can build into your marketing campaigns and organisational approach to diversity and inclusion.

What’s here?

You’ll find useful information on target audiences, effective communication, examples of current practice, practical downloads and information for producers and venues.

There are many crossovers between captioned and audio described performances in terms of how you might begin to reach a target audience, as well as both subtle and profoundly distinct differences. We have, for this reason, separated our focus on the two services for the marketing sections.

What patrons say …

Most importantly, we’ve based our recommendations on what deaf, deafened, hard of hearing, blind and partially sighted people have told us along the way.