Illuminate Shines a Light on Inclusivity

This year, Bedford Group is proud to be sponsoring the first all-access City Lights tour designed and delivered by Access2Arts, as part of the City Lights program at Illuminate Adelaide.

This incredibly popular event returns in the month of July to light up some of Adelaide’s iconic landmarks and natural environs. The installations will be a sensory feast, and while it is especially spectacular from a visual perspective, a few additional supports will now provide an enhanced experience for people with disability.

Rebecca Young, CEO of Access2Arts, says “art is important to all South Australians and we are thrilled to provide support for an all access program that enables people with a disability to fully experience the City Lights tour at Illuminate Adelaide.”

The tour will be hosted by Adelaide artist and disability advocate Andi Snelling and will cover six key light installation sites along North Terrace, and some of them will combine multi-sensory interactive elements. The work by Squidsoup ‘Submergence’, for example, involves the viewer moving through thousands of individual points of suspended light that provide a tactile experience you can literally reach out and touch!

One of the key elements of the all-access tour will be the audio description delivered via headsets. This description will open up the experience to a whole new audience of art-lovers in the disability community. Audio describers provide a live commentary of the visual elements of the installations. This is designed for people who are blind and vision impaired, but is also proven to be helpful for people with Autism Spectrum disorders.

The descriptions of the works are creative, comprehensive, and provide an immediate context behind the stories of the artworks that help to enhance the experience. The audio describers don’t attempt to interpret the artwork - this is always left up to the person experiencing it first-hand, as it should be!

There will also be a Deaf-led Auslan tour, sharing key information about the background of each installation and providing an immersive experience for members of the Deaf community.

Other key accessibility points for the tour include;

• Wheelchair friendly route
• Accessible bathroom facilities en route
• Bookings via Access Hub (including provision for Companion Card)

There will be one tour per night from 25 to 27 July, with a capacity of 20 people each night. The Auslan tour will run in conjunction with the main tour - date TBC.
Please click here to register your interest in attending!

We are looking forward to welcoming people with disability to this amazing festival!

Click here to listen to an example of Access2Arts Audio Description

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