This information will be published as soon as possible.
Only recently, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport has carried out initiatives aimed at the inclusion of other disadvantaged groups such as the disabled. Thus, in July 2011, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Health, Social Policy and Equality presented the document A Comprehensive Strategy of Culture for All, that sought to provide full accessibility to spaces, cultural activities and services managed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage; to encourage artistic creation of people with disabilities, as well as their activity as direct cultural managers; and to promote research on technologies that facilitate accessibility to cultural content and spaces.
Also in 2011, an inter-ministerial body (Inclusive Culture Forum) was created for the follow-up of this initiative, which was composed of both Ministries, along with National Heritage, the largest organisation representing people with disabilities, public and private referral centres and various experts. In April 2018, the Council of Ministries approved to introduce the entitled Marrakech Directive (2017/1564/UE Directive) into the Spanish legal system aimed to improve the access of people with visual disability to printed works.
The current Culture Plan 2020 of the State Secretariat for Culture for the period 2017-2020 gives further impetus to some of the previous initiatives, such as, those developed by the INAEM and related to the social accessibility to the heritage sector.
More specific institutional initiatives in this area include the participation of the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (INAEM) in several projects, such as Teatro Accesible [Accessible Theatre], which includes audio description for people with disabilities, the organisation of the A different look Festival by the National Drama Centre that programmes shows made by artists with disabilities, and the organisation of the Conference on Social Inclusion and Education in Performing Arts. A book celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Workshops organized by INAEM was published at the end of 2018. The Teatro Accesible [Accessible Theatre] initiative, promoted by Vodafone Foundation, CRLnuevavida and APTENT, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Culture and Sport, provides theatres and cultural institutions with accessibility for communication solutions and systems of hearing assistance.
In the heritage and museum sector, the programme Museos más sociales [Museums More Social] of the Ministry aims to improve the social accessibility to cultural heritage. It also defines the concept of “accessible museum” as the one that eliminates physical, sensorial and intellectual barriers to ensure the optimal accessibility to venues and contents. There are also international cooperation actions to train cultural managers. For instance, the Accessible Culture & Training Project (2015-2018) – funded by Erasmus+ with the participation of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Transit Projectes and the Department of Culture of the Catalan government – provided training to cope with the needs of cultural institutions to provide fully accessible events to guarantee cultural participation for every citizen.
Comments are closed.