Hello. Welcome to this video, in which you will learn about different audiences that have some kind of impairment and may therefore be in need of one or more specific access services. For the purpose of this MOOC, we will group the target audience into three broad categories: people with sensory impairments, physical impairments, and mental and intellectual impairments. First we will look at people with sensory impairments, more in particular people who are visually impaired and people with a hearing impairment. Worldwide, an estimated 253 million people are visually impaired. 36 million of them are blind, and 217 million suffer from moderate or severe vision impairment. Given these numbers, given the fact that some people are born blind while others become blind at different stages in life, and given the fact that there are several eye conditions and degrees of eye loss that all result in different types of visual impairment, we can conclude that this is a very diverse audience. The second group within the category of sensory impaired people are the deaf and hard of hearing. According to the World Health Organisation, approximately 360 million people or more than 5% of the world population, have disabling hearing loss. 32 million of these are children. Within this group, people who suffer from mild to severe hearing loss are generally referred to as hard of hearing. People who suffer from profound hearing loss are referred to as deaf. Now, what’s this about deaf with and without a capital letter? Well, they are two different groups and there is an important distinction. The word deaf with a small letter is used to refer to anyone who has disabling hearing loss. The word Deaf with a capital letter refers to people who have been deaf all their lives and are, as such, pre-lingually deaf. For these people, the national language used by hearing people is usually a second language, and they communicate through sign language. This is very important to know when you are planning or organising an accessible event, as will become clear in Unit 3, where you will learn about the different access services. The second category of disabled people are people suffering from a physical impairment. As the term already indicates, we talk about this kind of impairment when a certain part of the person’s body is damaged or doesn't work properly. This results in a reduced physical functioning or mobility that limits these people in their daily life activities. The best known group in this category are probably wheelchair users. It will be clear that these people need a completely different type of access services than people suffering from sensory impairments. Issues you have to think about when you are planning your event are: Can these patrons access the venue, and how? Can they move around freely inside the venue? And is the seating in the auditorium of your venue accessible to them? All this, and much more, will be the topic of Unit 2. Finally, part of the special needs audience suffers from a mental or intellectual impairment. This is a very broad category that comprises, amongst other disabilities, any kind of impairment that affects a person’s mental abilities, for example because of an intellectual or cognitive disorder. Think of people with low IQ. It further encompasses people suffering from mental or psychiatric disorders, e.g. people suffering from Tourette syndrome. And finally, it includes development disorders such as autism or ADHD. As these people may find it difficult to understand or follow an event, or have difficulties to concentrate for longer stretches of time or to cope with the many stimuli they are presented with, they may need special services to get appropriate access to the event. What those services are and how they are implemented, will be explained in chapter 3. I know, this was a lot of information for a first video, but don’t worry. All you heard will be repeated, contextualised and elaborated in the following videos and units. So I hope to see you there.
