The Editor’s Post: Let’s all dance together — how a new ticketing platform is reshaping events accessibility

David Lyons 6th June 2025

Why social enterprise ticketing platform Humanitix is reshaping events accessibility: this week’s view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.

It was the socks that really made the message land for me. How do people with visual impairments make sure they’re wearing matching socks?

This realisation was brought to me by Laura Walker, CEO of charity Visibility Scotland, speaking at the launch of social enterprise ticketing platform Humanitix UK, an event held in the National Museum of Scotland on Wednesday evening.

Walker invited the audience to shut our eyes, then walked us through the process of attending the event as a person with a visual impairment. How would you accept the digital invitation? How will you find your phone and keys, that are never where you last left them? How will you dress (and make sure your outfit is coordinated)? How will you travel?

It was a powerful exercise which drove home a message both Visibility Scotland and Humanitix UK were keen to highlight: the importance of considering accessibility at every stage of event hosting.

Walker quoted Vernā Myers, an internationally recognised expert in equality, diversity and inclusion, who said: “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.”

In Scotland, 24% of adults have a disability, said Walker, with 200,000 people living with a vision impairment. Stroke is the leading cause of disability in Scotland, with 11,000 people in the country having a stroke each year, resulting in reduced vision for 50% of those.

Walker said: “It’s clear that at some point in our lives, we will need to make a reasonable adjustment, if not for ourselves, for somebody that we love. With this in mind, accessibility must not be an afterthought.”

Humanitix, founded in Australia but also operating in New Zealand, the USA and now the UK, prioritises making its platform as accessible as possible for people with disabilities and providing those people with the information they need to be able to make informed decisions about whether they can attend an event.

Co-founder Adam McCurdie told me these efforts were inspired by him and Humanitix’s chief technology officer attending a Microsoft hackathon to find tech solutions to problems faced by people with disabilities when they were first developing the platform.

Through speaking with people with a range of disabilities at the hackathon, McCurdie heard time and again that they had given up attending live events, particularly small community events, because of a lack of consideration of their needs.

The conversations led McCurdie and his CTO to realise ticketing platforms are perfectly placed to resolve many of the challenges disabled people face, be it websites which can’t be read by screen readers or a lack of information about the support and infrastructure available at an event.

The prototype the Humanitix team made won the hackathon and the platform’s commitment to prioritising accessibility grew from there. McCurdie said: “From appreciating just how influential the ticketing platform is in this problem, and realising that nobody else is interested in solving it, we said ‘we’re doing this as part of a dual impact strategy now.’”

Disability was also a theme in the journalism training we delivered for Theirworld’s Global Youth Ambassadors this week. We welcomed journalist Priti Salian to the session as a guest speaker, whose experience includes conducting research on disability inclusion in Indian media as a journalist fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and writing the Reframing Disability newsletter.

Salian outlined a five-point framework for covering disability accurately and inclusively to the trainees. She encouraged the group to: move beyond the victim/hero narrative; centre the social model of disability; adopt a rights-based approach; avoid one-dimensional narratives and use inclusive language.

I’ll leave the last word on disability and accessibility to Walker, who asked two things of the audience at the Humanitix launch: “Two points of change that I ask from you all when you return to the office. One, if you’ve not done it already, sign up to Humanitix to share events on a portal that prioritises accessibility and social impact. And two, make accessibility a top priority on absolutely every agenda.”