David Baldwin, Producer of Cinema & Screen at Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, shares learnings from Expanding The Frame, their project to embed accessibility into their cinema programme.
Around 25% of the UK population has a disability of some kind – a huge audience for whom accessibility is essential.
When I started working as the cinema programmer for the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, major efforts were in process to make the venue as a whole more accessible, while the cinema programme struggled to keep up and make meaningful interventions.
After Film Hub Midlands approached us about working on a project to boost cinema audiences for independent cinema in Birmingham, I knew that the focus needed to be on accessibility. The cinema needed to be raised up to where the rest of the centre was currently sitting. Given the suitable title Expanding The Frame, we began a three-year process of embedding accessibility into the very DNA of the cinema programme.
Crucially, we didn’t start with the idea that we had all the answers – we wanted it to be a dialogue between the cinema and our audience. If we wanted to meaningfully develop disabled audiences and make them feel that MAC cinema welcomes everyone, we knew we needed to involve them in the process. That involved surveys, but also talking to people at events about what was working and what wasn’t. Any communication we received from customers emailing in with a comment or complaint about the programme was followed up on, and the conversation often expanded to ask for feedback in other areas.
The first job on the agenda was to increase the number of accessible screenings and to give them desirable slots in the programme. The amount of screenings featuring audio description (AD) and descriptive subtitles (DS) increased, more relaxed screenings were added, and we ensured that prime time slots were given to these screenings – so a Friday or Thursday evening. That signalled a shift in how we were thinking and helped demonstrate to our audiences that MAC was now taking accessibility seriously.
With input from access consultant Charlie Little, we also changed the language of how we described screenings for the hard of hearing from ‘captioned’ to ‘descriptive subtitled’ on both the website and in our printed brochures. Captioned always seemed like a strangely generic term, whereas descriptive subtitles do exactly what it says on the tin – offering subtitles which describe sounds and music alongside the actual dialogue.
We looked to source subtitled trailers, which are surprisingly hard to get hold of. More distributors are doing them regularly now, like Disney, MUBI, and Paramount, but there are still many releases that don’t have DS trailers available. It might sound like a minor thing, but it’s a clear example of removing accessibility within a supposedly accessible screening – if the trailers aren’t subtitled, then any hard-of-hearing customer would rightly feel that they are being left out. Any cinema operation is hampered by what distributors can offer (audio-described trailers still seem like a pipe dream), but efforts were made to make inclusivity the key.
We also looked at our accessible technology and updated our audio description system, now utilising Auracast Bluetooth technology to allow for a simpler and clearer AD set-up, and we held more regular sensory screenings for customers with complex needs of all ages, as well as offering free screenings to schools in the area.
All of this was a conscious effort to make disabled audience members feel like MAC cinema was for them. Whilst our marketing team put the word out via mailing lists, social networks and printed promotional material, the impact of word of mouth was just as strong – perhaps more so. Transforming how people perceive your programme is the main part of building that audience, and the results have certainly borne that out. When we launched Expanding The Frame in 2023, we estimated that in the third year of the project, we’d get around 2,700 people attending across all our accessible screenings. In the end, the actual number was over 7,000 people. That’s the result of a committed effort to embed accessibility into the programme.
It’s also important to own up when you get things wrong. When one hard-of-hearing customer came to a screening of the film Past Lives that had been labelled as including descriptive subtitles, she soon discovered that due to a miscommunication with the projection team, the wrong version of the film was playing. No description of sounds or music, and no subtitles for the sections in English, only for any foreign language. As such, she was completely unable to enjoy the film. An embarrassing error, and one we ensured we learnt from by overhauling how we communicated to the projection team about which screenings featured AD and DS.
We still haven’t accomplished all we wanted to. When it comes to British Sign Language, for any event to be properly accessible to people who use BSL (which is its very own language), the entire film has to feature BSL interpretation. Reading subtitles and understanding BSL are two very different things, but no distributors offer BSL-interpreted versions of their films, and getting live BSL interpretation for every film you screen would be prohibitively expensive.
Those issues are now foremost in our minds, they’re not cursory nor secondary. We are always thinking about accessibility. We don’t always get it correct, and we are often at the mercy of what access files distributors can offer for each of their films, but the will and the passion are there.
And you often find that’s what audiences respond to the most.
If you’re interested in hearing more from MAC, alongside SQIFF, Matchbox Cine, and Birmingham Hippodrome, explore our Accessibility Across the Board Online Course created in partnership with Charlie Little.