ACCESSIBILITY AND CAPTIONING

‘18 million in the UK are deaf/hard of hearing - 1 in 4 of us’ - StageText

Slime and Pies have committed to implementing and improving our access provisions for all our productions. In order to do this successfully, we are honing our skills in one area of access at a time, starting with creative captioning.

For the ACE-funded R&D of Knit Your Own Boyfriend, we closely collaborated with a caption designer, deaf consultant producer and caption user focus group to ensure accessibility through captions was thoughtfully integrated into the creative and practical design of this production.

A key part of our process was holding focus groups with access users to feedback on the show. We paid participants for their time, in exchange for them providing us with both verbal and written feedback on the quality of captioning and accessibility. We used to develop and strengthen our access provisions on the production and future Slime and Pies shows. The aim was to both increase engagement with neglected audience groups that tend not to access theatre and to pass on these practices to other companies and artists. We will be putting this into action with our next project.

Caption users may include people who are deaf, deafened, hard of hearing, neurodivergent, have auditory processing disorder, speak English as a second language and more.