ACCESSIBILITY
The second conversations were convened under the heading of “accessibility” with an invitation to think about the bottlenecks encountered whilst developing accessible experiences. The conversations took place on the 13th and 14th of April 2026 and featured 6 artists across 2 sessions.
The second session in this sequence of Multisensory Storytelling Development Debriefs, was convened around the theme of access and accessibility, recognising that multisensory storytelling, in creating narratives available to multiple sensory modalities presents a lot of interesting opportunities for accessibility.
A common intention with the projects discussed was that experiences could be approached through more than one sense – audiences could look, listen, or touch the artworks – with each interaction being equally valid and meaningful.
how could we create an experience that could have, like, multilayered access points? So, you could access it through touch, through sight, through sound, through smell or temperature change or whatever it was and however people felt most comfortable to access it.
Additionally, the conversations were convened with the understanding that whilst opportunities to re-think how experiences were accessed by audiences, the technical assemblages being used to deliver multisensory experiences would present several challenges – and that these bottlenecks would impact not just what the experience would look/sound/smell/feel like, but how accessibility was centred within the development process.
One participant reflected early on:
my creative practice is very much this: for accessibility not to be an add-on at all. And it’s much easier to say than to do, especially because access is always seen as for others and it’s a nice thing, but it costs. And it’s for a minority, so really we’ll add it at the end as it’s nice to be nice, but it’s not the very core architecture of how things are made.
Across the two debrief sessions there was a wide variety of experience shared: from professional experience as an access consultant, to work stemming from engagements with disabled communities, to lived experience of disability.
Artists were consistently conscious and attentive to their own embodied experience both independent of and in relation to immersive technology and universally developed their projects according to their own considered experiences of the accessibility or otherwise of the available tools and technologies.
I’m hyperaware of how I meet the world and how the world meets me internally.
As underlined in the previous report, structural hurdles stemming from ableist and racist attitudes also informed how artists understood, encountered and dealt with bottlenecks in their creative practice. This is particularly acute when considering the bottlenecks around accessibility as the structural prejudices faced by marginalized creatives converge with prejudices faced by marginalized audiences, re-doubling the challenges along the development pipeline.
It was consistently acknowledged that the available means for delivering “off the shelf” accessibility were rarely adequate.
the technology needs to be as invisible as possible and non-disruptive and not become the point… It needs to be the facilitator to allow for the encounter to happen, that presence to happen.
Disruption is often the result of hardware “becoming the point” of the experience, a framing which often leads certain audiences to assume that experiences – involving headsets, or being ambulatory, or comfortable in crowds – is not for them.
Technologies were found, then, to be unhelpfully visible.
But also, oftentimes, the technology involved rendered the significant details that the artists and projects were interested in foregrounding and focussing on, invisible.
For example, in relation to AI translation:
if you can’t hear where I’m from, I become the same or, like, my accent is neutral enough, do you stop having preconceived ideas about me sat around the table with you? But then what does it lose of me? You’re not meeting me, you’re meeting a version of me that’s acceptable to you.
Likewise in trying to capture culturally specific dances:
So, with the Move AI, if I remember right, yes, they had finger tracking enabled because, with the kathak style, which was one of the specific ones, finger tracking would have been amazing because a lot of the stories are through movement, but also with the fingers as well. I remember the creative technologies showing the fingers looking like balloons, like literally just like sausage fingers, basically. They just weren’t tracking properly!
For some artists this is as much an opportunity as a problem. Given the rise of AI assisted tools, there is an imperative to make sure that their databases don’t deselect certain types of body, certain types of movement and certain culturally specific gestures from their tool-box.
If you look at a lot of the various LLMs out there, they deal with text. They deal with sound. They deal with your face. They deal with voice, all kinds of other mediums. But movement, and the capture of movement, is really, really, really complex, very, very deliciously, beautifully complex. Not just because you’re dealing with these very codified techniques like kathak or ballet, etc., but because the person doing that is… not a machine. Even the repetition of the same movement will have the subtlest of differences, which is, I would argue, the beauty of it, right?
This is exactly what we want to promote and explore. Not that we don’t want to use these forms of technology and motion capture, etc., but we want to make sure that we are leading and making the decisions about how they are then evolved.
However, this focus on which tools enabled or inhibited the development of the projects proved to be a narrow conceptualisation of how technical bottlenecks intersect with projects directly concerned with access.
Instead, a number of projects under discussion were developed not as stories/experiences/performances that would be widely accessible by design, but rather as interventions within contexts and spaces that produced narrowed conditions for participation and inaccessibility by default.
For example, one project intended to engage participants in a multi-lingual and BSL interpreted dining experience using AR:
the intention was to bring people together that may not necessarily feel comfortable and get past the uncomfortableness, hopefully through the use of some technology that would start bridging those gaps.
This sense that multisensory experiences – vastly more than legacy media experiences or even experimental forms of monosensory media like writing or audio – could engage audiences at the thresholds of their habitual experience was consistently held up as an advantage, a means to shine a light on everyday contexts and their inclusive or exclusive valences.
Multisensory and immersive experiences were widely celebrated for their potential to do away with some of frames of expectation that dominate in a gallery environment, and invite behaviours and engagements – touching, smelling, interacting – that some exhibition contexts exclude.
But not always!
Invitations to engage with artworks that fall outside of the embedded traditions of exhibition and spectatorship can cause their own issues:
But I think it could have been a lot of the, kind of, sensibility of the audience as well and it could have been the fact that they were feeling a bit awkward in being invited to a, kind of, artistic experience on a Friday when they were all scientists from the lab.
If you go into an experience and they go, “Oh, okay, this is a dancing experience. Now go dance,” I’m not going to dance. I’m just going to stand there like an idiot while everyone else dances. Even if I look stupid, I’m not going to be able to dance.
So, I was trying to explain that and they just- Because they’re a dancer, (Laughter) it turns out they couldn’t understand that feeling. They didn’t understand the uncomfort of being demanded to do something for entertainment for yourself, in a sense.
Multisensory Storytelling’s ability to intervene in sedimented social structures to disrupt or reflect structures that perpetuate marginalisation and inaccessibility can just as easily cause other forms of discomfort!
But of course, they should. That’s sort of the point.
Again the relational aspect of the development and production process was incredibly central to participants experience and, as with bottlenecks encountered in the process of worldbuilding relational tensions are exacerbated by a technical context, with technical bottlenecks becoming more consequential to the project when coupled with an interpersonal barrier and vice versa.
However, again the degree to which technical challenges could be mitigated by positive collaborations was significant. One artist reported that, despite all the challenges developing the piece the thing that went smoothly was the adaptation of established working practices – with a group of autistic adults – within the new production context.
As another artist summarised:
All it needs is for both parties not to feel that they’re going to fail each other.
This indicates one of the chief challenges facing the development of accessible experiences in immersive and multisensory contexts: the dominance of a paradigm that, by considering access retrospectively, only mitigates against failure and doesn’t reconceive of what a successful intervention might look like.
As these discussion made clear there are many ways in which an artwork, a toolkit, a development process or a technology can be accessible. But rather than categorise them according to their success or failure, the challenge is
“to keep the question open as stubbornly as possible.”