As the summer festival season gets underway, calls for better access for people with disabilities and health issues are getting louder. Mary Ferguson finds out more.
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oul legend Stevie Wonder has added his voice to the growing campaign for live concerts and music festivals to remove barriers to accessibility for people with disabilities or health conditions. The international singer, who has been blind since birth, used the Grammy Awards earlier this year to call for better access for disabled people. In a speech the singer said: “We need to make every single thing accessible to every single person with a disability.” And in many ways the music industry has been making moves to address this issue. But there is still more to be done.
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Many PH patients are used to having to plan carefully before attending events, but one of the main problems can be a lack of information available online – which can make this difficult. Earlier this year, an investigation carried out by disabled music fans on behalf of the campaign group Attitude is Everything (AiE), found that the majority of the 386 venue and festival websites investigated failed to provide adequate information on access for people with disabilities. The study found a third of the websites contained no access information at all
and less than 20 per cent contained information rated as ‘good’. The research by AiE also collected first-hand experiences of disabled festival and concert goers and found that some had been ordered out of disabled toilets for taking too long; had their medical equipment such as oxygen packs searched; or been questioned about their need to sit in a supported area because they didn’t have an obvious disability. Some festivals, however, are getting it right. In 2014, Glastonbury became the first festival to be awarded ‘gold’ status for its accessibility and has since campaigned for other festivals to step up their efforts. Last year it introduced a dedicated area, which offered somewhere to charge up
