Report: Disability Partnership Calderdale’s July 2019 Open Meeting
Disability Partnership Calderdale’s July 2019 Open Meeting featured two main presentations.
Brian Daltrey, director of DEX (Deaf Ex Mainstreamers)
Continuing our series of presentations looking at different disabilities, requested by our members, Brian spoke about deafness and about DEX and the work they do. DEX is an entirely deaf-led organisation that exists to raise awareness of the daily struggle that deaf children have in mainstream education. DEX uses the English dictionary definition of the word “deaf” to mean “wholly or partially without hearing” to apply to all children who have hearing loss.
Chloe Oldman and Robert Lofthouse from the Victoria Theatre
Chloe and Robert Lofthouse spoke about the theatre’s current levels of accessibility and how disabled people can attend performance. They also spoke about the theatre’s future plans to extend accessibility through a range of measures.
Summaries of Presentations
Brian Daltrey – Summary, DEX (Deaf Ex-Mainstreamers) Presentation
Chloe Oldman & Rebert Lofthouse – Summary – Victoria Theatre accessibility presentation
Videos of Presentations
The meeting also included the usual excellent free buffet, whilst attendees with a disability were able to claim full travel expenses upon arrival.
After the main presentations, Disability Partnership’s three new workers, Meg Allen, Julie Stott and Philip Ingham introduced themselves to the meeting, with Julie giving an overview of their work plans for the upcoming months.
The meeting also saw the trialling of a new layout for the room, with a move to a “café” style, with chairs around tables, rather than the usual rows of seats. This did seem to produce a more friendly and conversational atmosphere, though both wheelchair users and blind attendees found the layout difficult to navigate, so we will continue to search for the best layout – if you want to feed back on the layout, please do so via our usual email address: info@disabilitypartnershipcalderdale.org
Contact Us
General Enquiries: 07716122897
Malcolm Kielty (secretary): 07946510900
http://www.disabilitypartnershipcalderdale.org
email: info@disabilitypartnershipcalderdale.org
Accessibility At Our Open meetings
To enable everyone to be included and to be able to participate at our meetings, we have the following access arrangements:
- A technician operates a PA system. This has powerful radio microphones which are handed to any person (audience or presenters) who is speaking at the meeting. This enables people to hear what is said. The system is connected to the hearing induction loop system for the benefit of people who use hearing aids.
- There are two large screens where slides can be projected.
- Two Sign Language Interpreters are present at meetings to ensure that Deaf sign language users can understand proceedings and make their contribution to discussions by the interpreter ‘voicing over’ the sign language they use.
- We have a ‘speech to text’ (Palantype) operator. This highly trained professional person makes sure that everything that is spoken appears as text on the screens. This assists people who are deaf but are not sign language users.
